Cause Celeb highlights a celebrity’s work on behalf of a specific cause. This week, we had the pleasure of speaking with Alison Arngirm about her work with Protect.org.
Alison Arngrim is well known for her character Nellie Oleson on the hit show Little House on the Prairie. Since then, she has made many other TV appearances as well as being seen on film and stage. Alison was one of the original founders of Protect and is still on the National Advisory Board and the Board of Directors of The National Association to Protect Children helping to fight child abuse across the country. She also serves on the Ambassador Council of AIDS Project Los Angeles and on the Board of Trustees for Tuesday's Child.
The National Association to Protect Children is a national association that was founded in 2004. They work to protect children from sexual, physical and emotional abuse. They were formally known as Promise to Protect. Protect is also a national organization that works to gain legislation to protect children from sexual, physical and emotional abuse. They work on a national, state and local level. Protect and The National Association to Protect Children have a joint website as Protect.org
Interviewed by Giacinta Pace
Introduction by Meg Zrini
Q: Why and how did you get started working with Protect?
Alison: A family member convicted of raping a child would be out of the court house door five minutes later and have custody of the victim. Something’s not right! They [Protect] realized that there were extraordinary loopholes in the law, both at the state and federal level that allowed people who abuse children to go absolutely free. What if we had an organization which actually went into the state house and into Washington DC and advocated, lobbied, pushed for legislation and made functional changes to the law to better protect children and close these loopholes. I thought "what a brilliant idea." When [Protect] started they had already changed laws in North Carolina, Arkansas, and Illinois and they hadn’t even opened an office yet! They didn’t waste all their money on t-shirts and stationary and then try to do some work. I’ve been on the board of the National Association to Protect Children (Protect.org) ever since. In my case, indeed there is a personal connection, because as I’ve said quite publically on Larry King Live and in my book, I was sexually abused as a child myself. I completely understood the total short shrift that these victims get.
Q: How many states to date have they been able to change laws in at this point?
Alison: We’re up to seven or eight. We’ve done stuff on the federal level too. We have gotten legislation past that has allocated millions of dollars for law enforcement. We’re at least down to 30 states now with the change to the incest exception which is a law where if someone rapes their own child, if they’re related to the victim in any way, they can plead guilty and serve no jail time whatsoever. They have their record expunged as long as it’s their own child. In New York, your felonies are all by letter; you have ‘A felony’ and ‘B felony’ etc. So, people who rape their child, instead of being convicted of rape or sexual assault, they would plead guilty to incest which was an ‘E Felony’. That’s four years max, usually probation. In some states, rape would be a felony; incest would be a misdemeanor. It was based on a 17thcentury law that you shouldn’t marry your 30 year old cousin. It wasn’t a rape law; it was incest crime against the marital state. In California, a sex offender could have multiple victims and could rape all four of their children, they could have continuous sexual abuse. But as long as it said: parent, step parent, grandparent, brother, sister, uncle or anyone living in the home like a family member, meaning: the mom’s boyfriend, they were counted as a relative. And then they were eligible for deferral of sentence, so the sentence was not only deferred but the judgment was deferred. They were not listed as convicted sex offenders or registered sex offenders and the victims were usually required to attend therapy with the person who had sexually assaulted them. We went in and said “You know this is really nuts. We think that if somebody rapes a child, somebody rapes a child and that just because the victim didn’t correctly choose their rapist, they shouldn’t have to see them go free.” We successfully changed this law. We changed it in North Carolina, Arkansas, West Virginia, New York, California and Illinois. We also see that in states that haven’t encoded it, there’s a terrible push to try to reunite the family under even the most egregious bizarre circumstances of abuse. It’s sort of an uphill battle. We have been pleased because on the federal level we have been getting a lot of money allocated for the ICAC ‘Internet Crimes Against Children’ task force. There are people who are able to trace the uploads of child pornography. We’re seeing that so much of child pornography is made by the child’s own family or people known to the child. When these videos are uploaded of children being sexually assaulted, the police trace these to that computer, they have an address and they can actually remove children who are being actively abused.
Q: Do you deal directly with any of the victims?
Alison: No, We fight and try to educate law makers, lawyers, judges and the general public about these issues. As an organization in changing laws we’re not providing direct service to the victims. Now mind you, several victims from some very extreme cases have decided to come forward and speak. We have a thing called Alicia’s law. Alicia Kozakiewicz was kidnapped, assaulted and tortured, and she was only found because they were able to trace the internet connection of her kidnapper. Had they not been able to do this, they would not have found her in time. She goes and speaks around the country about the need for these kinds of teams to be able to form child rescues.
Q: Is there anything else that you’d like to add?
Alison: Anyone can go to protect.org. We have a whole thing on the website on how people can get involved in the local level, the state level and the county level. Right now our big push, we’re calling it ‘not one more child coalition.’ Right now the child exploitation and child pornography situation has exploded so severely. We’re talking about hundreds of thousands of people. This is in fact a state of emergency. We’re trying to get money to give to law enforcement teams and there is money available for the ICAC [Internet Crimes Against Children] teams but it isn’t being given out. We’ve heard from police departments that know where these people are. They have their addresses, they know what they’re doing, they’ve seen these videos of them abusing these children in the home and they simply don’t have the wherewithal and the man power to go and arrest them!
