Arms in blue shirts stretched around the Knox County Courthouse this afternoon to take a stand against child abuse.
Hands Around the Courthouse is organized by the Blue Ribbon Task Force of Knox County and is designed to bring to light alarming statistics about child abuse and encourage residents to do what they can to prevent it.
In Knox County in 2015 there were 506 reports of child abuse with 130 confirmed cases including 15 confirmed victims of child sexual abuse and 51 children taken into protective custody with all of those numbers going up in the past year according to CASA Executive Director, Sara Robison.
The event’s guest speaker State Rep. Don Moffitt spoke of the need to acknowledge the problems of abuse in the community and nation-wide pointing to former U.S. House Speaker Dennis Hastert caught in a child sex abuse scandal as someone that was trusted.
Moffitt also expressed the challenges of breaking the cycle of those who were abused themselves abusing children.
He drew on the words of George Bernard Shaw.
“You see things as they are and you ask why but I dream things that never have been and I ask why not’, so why not break the cycle of child abuse,” says Moffitt. “Together we can.”
There were almost enough people to link hands around the courthouse.
Only a small amount of ribbon was needed to close the gap.
