Case by Case: Alum Helps Her Home Country Address Sexual Abuse in Children

by Jill Anderson

In 1992, Marianela Soto Hurtado's career shifted as she observed Chilean psychologists and child care workers debrief a 5-year-old sexually abused girl.

Hurtado, a native of Chile, watched as the professionals somehow overlooked that the young girl was clearly telling them that her father touched her and she didn't like it. "The psychologist was dealing with the mother," Hurtado says. "No one was listening to the child."

Before she left that facility, the young girl approached Hurtado and said, "Will you help me?" The frustration Hurtado felt in that moment prompted her to focus on improving the training of social workers and psychologists in her birth country.

Through her dedication and passion, in the last three years Hurtado has single-handedly trained 529 professionals in how to deal with sexually abused children. Furthermore, she found the funding for these initiatives on her own.

While Hurtado was always interested in psychology, her goal was to become a child therapist with her own practice. However, as her career evolved so did her interests, and she ended up specializing in sexual assault training and education.

In 1977, Hurtado earned her bachelor's in psychology from Sweet Briar College. Shortly after, she pursued her master's in human development at HGSE. The Human Development and Psychology Program, particularly its focus on the theories of [famed developmental psychologist] Jean Piaget, drew her to HGSE. "At that time, I knew of no better place to study that way of thinking or [human] development. This was the place to do it," she says.

Hurtado continues to use what she learned at HGSE daily in her work, particularly in Chile.

In the 1990s, she began traveling to Chile, partly to visit family, but also to learn more about sexual abuse in the country. It soon became clear that Chile had some serious issues that needed to be addressed, including overflowing orphanages where abused children received little to no treatment.

By 1997 Hurtado had begun instructing universities in Chile about treatment of sexual abuse, expressive therapies, and preventative school mental health. In addition, the country's new government, fully aware of the ongoing issues stemming from sexual assault in families, proposed the opening of new treatment centers and asked Hurtado to train the staffs.

"In Chile, there were a lot of good proposals and ideas," she says, noting that the difficulty was in raising the funding to follow through. Despite the constraints, Hurtado was enthusiastic about the proposals and, while she waited for the centers to open, she took a job at the Giarretto Child Sexual Abuse Treatment Program in San Jose, California.

By 2000, the Chile Department of Justice informed Hurtado that they were ready for her to begin training, but that they couldn't afford to pay her. Hurtado, still eager to participate in the project, spent six months trying to find a nonprofit to support her work. Ultimately, she settled upon the International Child Resource Institute (ICRI) in Berkley, California. Even with the help of ICRI and the contributions of organizations such as the Bazter International Foundation and the Weyerhaeuser Family Foundation, it took nearly a year to earn the funds necessary for Hurtado to return to Chile and begin work at the treatment centers.

Hurtado's work, however, was slow. She developed a 40-hour training course using PowerPoint presentations, activities, role playing, and the introduction of step-by-step skills. The course, which was open to only 20 professionals at a time, showed them how to detect abuse through drawing pictures, behavioral symptoms, and forensic law. Hurtado also delved into training of treatment techniques and group therapy with the professionals.

While most, especially the lawyers, are appreciative of the skills they learned, Hurtado points out that Chile still has major steps to make in terms of recognizing and protecting sexually abused children before treatment, since, unlike in the US, there is no Department of Social Services.

"The first thing everyone needs to learn is that without protection there is no treatment," Hurtado says.

Hurtado hasn't been training at outpatient facilities since 2004, but she is compiling the information she collected over the years for a final report. In addition, once she finds the funding, she plans to return to Chile to complete the final part of the project, which includes training psychologists and child care workers at inpatient facilities.

While statistics have yet to show the direct impact of her training efforts, Hurtado is not discouraged. It took 20 years for abuse statistics to decrease in the US, she says. "Chile has only had about eight years so it's much too soon to say."

As Hurtado plans to continue her work in Chile in the future, she encourages and welcomes students, alumn or faculty interested to contact her.