CASA creates display to represent abused and neglected children

Child protection organizations mark Child Abuse Prevention Month

CHEYENNE — Within the past year, more than 200 children in Laramie County have entered the foster care system due to abuse and neglect.

This number doesn’t even cover the number of children who endure abuse and neglect from people outside of their homes, and therefore can stay with their families as caseworkers address the abuse.

While these traumatic cases can be life-altering for children and their families, they don’t have to navigate those traumas alone. Law enforcement, the legal system and several independent organizations have banded together to assist these kids.

Among them is Court Appointed Special Advocates of Laramie County, a branch of a national program that trains volunteers to serve as advocates for children in abuse and neglect cases.

April is designated as Child Abuse Prevention Month, a time to raise awareness and spark important conversations about the prevention of child abuse and neglect, according to CASA Laramie County Program Coordinator Jennifer Quinlivan.

As a part of its efforts this month, CASA has created an awareness display constructed with lattice and wood, featuring more than 200 stuffed animals representing all of the children who are currently in the system as a result of abuse and neglect.

“It serves as a poignant and thought-provoking reminder of the ongoing need for collective action to protect vulnerable children in our community,” Quinlivan shared in an email statement.

The stuffed animals, donated for the project by members of the community, have been altered to represent the children who have experienced abuse and neglect. Some stuffed animals have visible marks of physical abuse, such as a black eye. Others appear completely OK to represent less visible impacts of neglect or other kinds of abuse.

These details were important to communicating the nature of abuse to the public, according to CASA of Laramie County Executive Director Sarah Urbanek, who pointed to a small teddy bear with some physical abuse markers and “my first teddy” embroidered on the belly.

“Child abuse and neglect is one of those things that people don’t want to really acknowledge happens in their community,” Urbanek said. “They really want to think that it happens to those people on that side of town, not next door to them.”

Urbanek hopes that the display helps people recognize that this can happen to children, no matter where in town they live or what school they go to.

“It’s not like they come from just these specific schools or these low-income neighborhoods,” Urbanek said. “They come from all over our community. It can very well be your neighbor. It very well can be a member of your family. I want people to recognize that it is really prevalent in our community, and until we start to really look at that and understand how often it’s happening in our community, we can’t do anything about it.”

The display will be shared across the community, including in the lobby of Cheyenne Regional Medical Center starting Monday. It will also make an appearance at this month’s Greater Cheyenne Chamber of Commerce luncheon alongside presenting sponsor Safe Harbor, a children’s justice center.

Anyone else who is interested in hosting the display is welcome to reach out to CASA staff.

Safe Harbor Director Lynn A. Storey-Huylar and her team assist child victims as a multidisciplinary team.

The program allows law enforcement, child protection professionals, prosecutors, and the mental health and medical communities to work together when intervening in child abuse cases with the main goal of ensuring children are not further victimized by systems designed to protect them.

They also provide forensic interviews of children, whether they enter the foster system or not.

“The nature of children is supposed to be fun and enjoyable,” Storey-Huylar said. “And we need to do everything we can to prevent trauma and tragedy that happens to kids.”

“A lot of my kiddos that I do forensic interviews with may never touch CASA (or) the system, because their perpetrator is somebody outside of the family,” Storey-Huylar said. “They’re safe to still be within the home.”

Storey-Huylar is also the facilitator of the Laramie County Child Protection Team, which keeps an eye on trends around child crimes in the area with the goal of impacting those trends. The top four issues Storey-Huylar identified were sexual abuse, physical abuse, drug-endangered children and children witnessing crimes such as domestic violence and murders.

Using funds provided by the Wyoming Children’s Trust Fund, the team has been able to implement initiatives that assist families with the goal of alleviating child crimes.

An example of this is providing lock boxes for families to secure substances and keep them out of reach of children who may mistake a marijuana edible for candy.

“One of the trends in our community is high drug usage; that’s no surprise,” Storey-Huylar said. “But we are finding a lot of cases where kids were getting into their parent’s marijuana edibles, because a lot of times they look like candy … and in this community, we have had some kids overdose on marijuana edibles. So we bought a lot of these lock boxes. We want to encourage parents to lock those edibles up away from kids where they can’t get a hold of those.”

Many of the organizations that assist families and children through instances of abuse and neglect use this month to bring attention to the work they do.

In addition to viewing CASA’s display, community members are welcome to attend Gov. Mark Gordon’s Child Abuse Prevention Month Proclamation signing at the Capitol in Cheyenne at 2:30 p.m. Monday. Afterward, those in attendance will plant pinwheels on the Capitol grounds to symbolize the children impacted by abuse.

Organizations such as CASA, Safe Harbor and the Wyoming Citizen Review Panel — which works to improve the state’s child welfare system through evaluation, advocacy and policy recommendations — encourage the public to attend the proclamation signing and support child abuse prevention organizations.

“Every child deserves a safe and loving home, and there’s lots and lots of factors that go into creating that,” WCRP Executive Director Brenda Birkle said. “So if there’s one thing I could impress upon people is really supporting the organizations that provide services to families and to children, particularly at-risk families and children.”

This story was published on April 3, 2025.