from Dr. Hanita Zimrin, Founder & Director of ELI

Dear Friends:
Much attention is currently focused on the problem of domestic violence, as well it should be. But too few of us recognize and understand the link between domestic violence and child abuse. ELI’s experience shows—and research confirms this—that wherever there is child abuse, there is a high probability of domestic violence. And domestic violence often has its roots in child abuse. A child who sees conflict resolved through violence will, as an adult, use violence to settle differences. Children learn behavior through modeling and vicarious learning. The behaviors they observe at home become ingrained in their thinking, affecting their psychological makeup and how they interact with others.
Abused children feel helpless. Unable to avoid being treated in a violent way by an arbitrary force, they become passive victims. They lose the ability to trust people, sometimes for the rest of their lives.

Girls who are abused often develop a fatalistic approach to life. If abused by a parent, she knows she has no one to turn to for protection. Her state of mind is defeatist: she can’t prevent abuse, but she’ll try to behave well, to avoid conflict and abuse. As a woman, she becomes an easy target.
Her thinking is to “try to be good” to avoid abuse by a man, but she cannot prevent it altogether.
When abused boys grow up, they recall behaviors from their childhood home. They view others, including wives and children, as objects to satisfy their own needs. No longer passive, as men they actively resolve feelings of helplessness through aggression and respond to marital discord as abusing husbands.

Abused boys may become abusing husbands, and abused girls often grow to be battered women. The differences between the behaviors of abused girls and boys are often a function of cultural gender expectations.

After more than two decades of experience, ELI affirms that therapy can stop current abuse, alter adult behavior, and help children overcome the devastation resulting from abuse that can affect their ability to form relationships of love and trust throughout their lives. Therapy today is the prevention for tomorrow—with therapy today we can prevent child abuse and the battered women’s syndrome tomorrow.

B’shalom,
Hanita Zimrin

Operational since the fall of 2002, ELI Satellites are located in Tiberias, Haifa, Kiryat Malachi and the southern coast, and the Jerusalem Corridor. In early 2003 a fifth Satellite started as well: an Arab social worker from Nazareth who completed ELI training and serves Arab communities in the Galilee area.

ELI’s newest creation is an Orbiting Satellite! An Orbiting Satellite is a therapist who is transported by the ELI Van, a mobile therapy unit, to locations where and when the need arises. For instance, an Orbiting Satellite may rush to an area too small to be served by a Satellite, either in response to a terrorist incident or a report of the rape of a child. It may also come to the aid of a Satellite Therapist who is suddenly deluged by demand for services, helping with a temporary surge in caseload. Or an Orbiting Satellite can bring a male social worker to a site where his presence as a male role model is specifically warranted.

The ELI Van, Satellite Therapists, and Orbiting Satellite are innovations in service delivery to insure that people receive the therapy they need to repair the damage of child abuse and prevent future occurrences. Timing can be crucial to assuring that children and families accept and receive the help they need in moments of crisis and trauma that accompany incidents of abuse. ELI is proud of its ability to meet these needs and gratified by the support of the foundations, communities and individuals across the United States who have made these unique services possible.

Expanded Role in Kiryat Malachi
For nearly a year ELI has had a Satellite Therapist working in Kiryat Malachi, serving that town and Israel’s southern coast. Early indications foretell a successful association there between ELI and local authorities, bolstered by initial support from the region’s Partnership 2000 collaborator, the Jewish Community Federation of Greater East Bay in Oakland, California.

Building on a strong beginning, the Greater East Bay Federation has allocated proceeds from a bequest to expand ELI’s role there. For each of the next two years ELI will receive $52,000 to increase the proficiency of the town’s existing social service providers to better meet client needs. ELI is conducting a special training course on “abuse-focused therapy” that is geared to the varying experience and skills levels of the local welfare agency’s 21 social workers. The course is a series of daylong sessions meeting every other week. Each session consists of a lecture on theoretical bases of therapeutic treatment of abused children and their families, plus an experiential workshop component for training and practice in therapeutic treatment skills.

In addition, ELI and the Satellite Therapist are providing supervision to the welfare agency staff, enabling enrichment and extended learning opportunities for the latter. For example, the Satellite Therapist and a welfare agency social worker might work as co-therapists, such as in family treatment situations where more than one therapist is required.

By integrating ELI’s services with those of the Kiryat Malachi welfare agency, ELI provides backup from a skilled therapist, training for their social workers, and enrichment for both through the co-therapy experience. At their request, ELI is preparing an anthology of articles, book chapters and other reference materials as a training manual for both current and future education programs.

Kiryat Malachi, one of Israel’s early development towns for housing new immigrants to the young State, has been plagued by high unemployment and a weak economy. Mired in poverty, people in that area are quite needy, and the social services system is unable to meet their needs. However, the combined efforts of ELI and the local welfare agency, with the generous backing of the Greater East Bay Federation, will make a significant difference for troubled populations.

This project may indeed serve as a model for effective working relationships in Israel between non-governmental organizations and Jewish federations.

Advancing Knowledge
Nonprofit organizations are the frontline workers in serving human needs. Their staffs work with people on a daily basis to solve problems and alleviate suffering. They see what works and what does not. In contrast to large government agencies, they enjoy the immediacy and flexibility to detect changing needs and create innovative techniques or new approaches.

As part of its mission and core organizational values, ELI is committed to advancing knowledge for the treatment and prevention of child abuse. While ELI is proud of its achievements and the worldwide recognition it has received, we believe that more needs to be done, and that ELI is particularly suited to the task. Therefore, ELI is seeking support for a Research and Development Department (R&D).

An R&D Department will encourage and support research of individual professionals as well as collaboratives among direct service organizations, academic communities, and relevant government entities. ELI will offer itself as a subject for research: ELI staff represent numerous disciplines, including psychologists, social workers, educators, medical professionals, and others; and ELI has uses multiple treatment models and techniques, many of which ELI has developed.

Practitioners for the development component will innovate ways to deliver services, new therapeutic techniques (i.e. simulations, role-plays, art therapy, etc.), and new ways to teach those techniques to other service providers. Again, ELI can be used as a laboratory and testing ground.

ELI presenty has a library of more than 5,000 documents on child abuse, much of it derived from ELI’s own work. Already active, in the months ahead ELI will propel R&D activity: expanding the knowledge base on child abuse; sharing ELI’s singular experiences and the treatment modalities it has developed; fostering new research and development.

University Research Praises ELI Drama
Last spring we reported to you about the new educational drama Yael Learns to Protect Her Body, written by an expert team of ELI psychologists to present to 4-7 year old children not yet able to use written materials on child abuse. Through songs, humor, a colorful set, creative costumes, and imaginative props, well-known actress Yael Feder has taught multitudes of young Israeli schoolchildren about “good touch/bad touch” and ways to say no to inappro-priate behavior.

The Department of Communications of Tel Aviv University decided to study the play and gauge its efficacy as an educational entertainment strategy for communicating social messages to children. The newly released findings are quite laudatory.

After studying international literature to determine what messages need to be given to children, they investigated the Yael play on several levels. They tested the appropriateness of the messages of the play as well as the ability of the theater concept and its light-hearted technique to transfer the messages. They studied the staging, the language, the characters used, the length of each scene, the number of messages intended for transfer, and the size of the audiences. In each instance, the Yael play was found to be both appropriate and successful in its mission and methods.
The research was conducted by Vered Samuel as a final research and thesis project for her Bachelors Degree. Her work was under the direction of Dr. Norit Gutman of the Faculty of Communications.

Click here for the Spring 2004 issue