The Family Advocacy Office is the point of contact for Tinker personnel to report child and intimate partner violence, as well as seek treatment. The helping agency also focuses on prevention programs. Family Advocacy Element Chief 1st Lt. Adrianna Harrell is passionate about taking care of the people who risk their lives every day to defend the county’s freedoms. The Family Advocacy office can be reached at 582-6604.
What are the most important ways your agency serves Tinker? What are the services offered through the Family Advocacy Office?
“We have a pretty big mission, but the long and short of it is to take care of families. We take care of anything with regard to family maltreatment. What that looks like is any violence between intimate partners, any violence against children in the home and the domestic violence support services. We have a new parent support program for families with children up to the age of 36 months. That’s an awesome home-based program where our registered nurses will go in to look at stages of development and really support parents. We do all sorts of outreach classes. We do parenting classes, infant child CPR, we go into the different units and do trainings per their requests based on their needs.
We’re here to do prevention, but if families meet the criteria for maltreatment we’re not a punitive program. We’re not a program that does any kind of punishment we’re here for treatment. Once that case goes forward and they do meet the criteria, then we’re here to say ‘okay, this happened in your family, what can we do now to take care of you?’ That could be individual therapy. If we get a call from pediatrics and they say ‘...we have a concern about this family’ then we’ll go right down and meet with them in the clinic. Anytime there’s a high risk for violence, we automatically call together a team; we stop everything and pull that team together to do a safety plan.
We’re here to help families heal and recover when they do rise to the level of maltreatment, but if we can prevent that, that’s also something we try to do.
So again, it’s a big mission, we take care of all branches and really whatever our families need, that’s what we’re here to do. We consult with our commanders and first sergeants a lot, talk to all members of the family and make sure everyone’s treated fairly and a primary concern is everybody’s safety.”
It’s Child Abuse Awareness month — what has Family Advocacy done to highlight this?
“Things have shifted more recently where Family Advocacy no longer primarily owns the prevention and awareness months. We’ve shifted from that primary prevention to secondary prevention. We support the Violence Prevention Integrators in creating the programming. We’ve entered that transition because we’ve owned them for so long and we love them and we want to make sure that they continue, and since we’re the experts since we’ve done it for so long, we help them coordinate it.
For this month, on the 10th we did a lunch-and-learn where one of our clinical social workers goes in and teaches parents and kids about the impact of screen time and trying to keep it healthy and in perspective. We want parents to have the tools to monitor that. On the 24th, we’ll be having a program called ‘She’s 13’ along with the SAPR office that is about being aware of online predators and how to stay safe and keep your kids safe. It’s that tough balance because you want to start giving them independence and autonomy, but our kids don’t always have the skills to identify that sort of thing and sometimes parents don’t either. On the 26th we’ll be having a Helping Agencies Fair at the Base Exchange. Sometimes people don’t know that Family Advocacy exists until something goes wrong. We continue to make our presence known so if something happens, maybe not to an individual, but to someone they know, they can reach out. We work really closely with our Helping Agencies because even though our missions may be different they all overlap. We just want folks to be aware of what’s out there and get what they need.”
When an individual reaches out to the Family Advocacy office what can they expect?
“They can expect to be welcomed and accepted, period. That’s number one. This is not a judgmental space. This is a space where no matter what you’re calling for we want you to feel safe opening up. We do have a referral form that we fill out on our end to get the details and from there, depending on why they’re reaching out; they’ll be connected with the appropriate person. First and foremost, they’re going to be treated like humans and not inconveniences and they won’t be shamed.
Everything that comes in comes through me and then I’ll staff it, disposition it and figure out what the best treatment plan is. If we don’t have what they need, we know how to get them to where they need to go. We give them options, nothing is forced.”
What are the common misconceptions about your agency?
“(A misconception) is that Family Advocacy is a punishment-based program and that if you’re coming to Family Advocacy you’re being punished. Or that you’re only going to Family Advocacy if something is wrong or if something bad has happened and that’s just not true. So many of our programs are prevention based. The goal is to keep something from happening. Even if we take the case all the way through and there is an issue of maltreatment that’s been substantiated, we’re still not going to punish them. It’s still up to their discretion and their commander’s discretion whether or not they even engage in services. We cannot force their hand, we make the recommendations and reach out and hope that they do, but one of my hopes for Family Advocacy is that people come before something goes wrong, before there is an incident, before their marriage gets so rough, before someone is harmed. We want to take care of them beforehand. There’s no punishment by us, there’s only treatment.”
What’s your favorite part of working in your position?
“My heart is to be able to take care of people. I love to be able to see people, sometimes in their worst moments, and be able to provide hope and see them through the recovery process. I take my job very personally and seriously in that there was a time in the military when these services weren’t available, and now that they are I think it’s phenomenal. I’m passionate about it because I know there’s a need. We’re here to meet that need and we get to watch people heal and become whole. To be able to see that process and reach out and instill those things early and young in Airmen is really a privilege. It sets a tone--these are things that a lot of people don’t even come out of their homes with because we don’t know how to teach people about feeling their feelings and setting boundaries and knowing their value. Being able to see just a small part of these people’s journey is my favorite part of this job. I worked at the VA before I commissioned and saw what toll could be taken on the back end of military service, to know I could join and heal some of that before it starts was something I felt like I absolutely had to do.”