It has been said about child abuse that it "casts a shadow the length of a lifetime." Suzin Bartley, executive director of the Massachusetts Children's Trust Fund, has spent a professional lifetime trying to bring light to this darkness. She describes a chilling analogy—a haunting image that she has—of standing in a boat on a wide river, watching a baby float in the current. She grabs for the baby. Another one floats by, and she reaches out again. Again and again, until the boat is filled with babies. She then realizes that while it's critical to save babies floating in the river, she also need to find out who is throwing them in, and then try to stop them.

In a sentence that's what Bartley and the Massachusetts Children's Trust Fund is all about: prevention.

Each year, about three million reports of child abuse are filed nationally - from physical abuse and neglect to pedophilia. It's a stunning statistic about a subject most would prefer to avoid. "We need, as a society, to get over the reluctance of talking about this, pretending that it doesn't happen, and focus on the solutions - strict reporting systems, education and counseling," Bartley said in a lengthy interview with the Boston Irish Reporter. "We need to work hard to stop the signs and break the chain." Many abusers, she says, were abused themselves as children. "If we can prevent children from being abused, we can greatly diminish the number of abusers."

Established in 1988 by an act of the Massachusetts Legislature, the Children's Trust is the only such state organization dedicated to preventing child abuse and neglect. With private, state, and federal funding, the trust supports more than 100 family education programs throughout the state and offers training and technical assistance to professionals who work with children at risk and with their families.

As the director of the multi-million dollar trust, Bartley, a woman with deep Dorchester ties, oversees a child abuse education network and home visiting program for young parents that has become a national model. "For a long time," she concedes, "we were stuck, as a society, in a place of just pulling babies onto a lifeboat. Now we're combing the shorelines collectively, looking for who's tossing them in."

A licensed independent clinical social worker (LICSW), Bartley is no stranger to community service and organizing as she has worked over the years in children's centers, at city hospital, and with health and neighborhood action committees in Dorchester and Jamaica Plain. A University of Massachusetts graduate with a master's in social work from Smith College, she is an adjunct on the faculty of the School of Social Work at Boston College. She also has been a member of several gubernatorial commissions – on Sexual and Domestic Violence; Responsible Fatherhood and Family Support; Sexual Assault and Abuse; and on School Readiness – while serving additionally on the Cardinal's Commission for the Protection of Children. She was a founding member of the Uphams Corner Health Center, served on the Fuller Street Neighborhood Association, the Dorchester Women's Committee, the Boston Center for Blind Children, and now is vice president of the board of trustees of Friends for Children in Dorchester.

Asked about her penchant for community service and zeal for the protection of children, Bartley, 59, who grew up in working class Brighton and in Watertown on a street where ten firefighters and their families lived, reflects on her maternal grandfather and her parents—John and Anne (Colpoys). Her grandfather, Frank, whose family tree traces back to the 1500s in County Clare, was a state lawmaker from South Boston in the early 1900s, a member of the Boston General Council in the days before there was a City Council, and a close friend of the late Speaker of the US House, John McCormack.

"My grandfather had a passion for community; it was contagious," she recalls. "I was brought up in a household where you were taught to be active in church and community, where you were encouraged to seek your passions in life to the fullest for the betterment of others. I was taught to stand up for what is right no matter the personal cost

Bartley's father, John, is a retired civil engineer who oversaw land acquisitions for Boston Edison. A third-generation Irish American, he has close family ties to Tuam, Galway. "My father is a character in the best sense of the word," she says. "A dry humor in all ways, but a man who always encouraged us to do our best." A collector of antique cars, he still owns the 1937 Ford that took his wife and daughter home from St. Elizabeth's maternity ward.

Bartley's mother, Anne, was first a housewife, then a nutritionist in the Lexington school system. She ran the Girl Scout troop at St. Theresa's in Watertown, and kept Bartley, her brother John, and her sister Anne closely in tow. Growing up, Bartley never played sports, verboten, she said, for girls of the day, but earned the prestigious Marian Award in Girl Scouts, the highest Catholic medal given in honor of Mary, the first female disciple of Christ. "My parents," she says, "were deeply religious and very involved in the church; the same was expected of us."

What was also fully expected, Bartley says, was respect for others, no matter the consequence, the race, color, or creed. She remembers an intense confrontation her senior year at Watertown High School after she had transferred from Mt. Trinity Academy, which had closed. Holding tight to her parents' values, she stood firm on an inequity issue in a way that caused disruption in the cafeteria lunch program. She and her parents were summarily summoned to the principal's office for a collective disciplinary session where the Bartleys were taken to task for her actions. But Mrs. Bartley didn't take the bait, and refused to shake the principal's hand on the way out. "Now I know why I sent my daughter to Mt. Trinity Academy," she told him. "And I will scrub floors before any of my other children come here!" She then walked out.

Bartley, who calls herself a socially conscious child of the 60s, never forgot the moment.

After high school, she attended Regis College to study sociology and then UMass Amherst where she majored in Urban Community Services. When she was 19, she moved to Uphams Corner during the early days of school busing and married Chris Navin, a man with family in Kerry and Cork who operates a consulting practice in human services and strategic planning—Navin Associates. The two of them were founders of the neighborhood health center at a time when the infant mortality rate there was very troublesome. The couple have two children, Brian, a Holy Cross graduate, and Paul, a freshman in the honors program at the University of Alabama.

In many ways, Bartley "grew up" in Dorchester during busing. She says she was horrified by what she saw—rocks thrown at the homes of black families who had moved close to white neighborhoods. She and her husband often stood out on the street to identify the culprits to police. "There were times when I was embarrassed to be Irish Catholic," she says. "Collectively, we forgot for a time where we came from. The Irish became oppressors."

Always one to seek redemption, Bartley says she learned about the importance of community first-hand in Dorchester. "I remember driving down Blue Hill Avenue in 1972, and was blown away by the poverty. I couldn't imagine how I could have grown up so close to it and never seen it. That moment shaped me forever. It was a call to action."

After college, she engaged her bent for community activism and worked a spate of jobs: as a community organizer for the Ecumenical Social Action Committee in Jamaica Pain and the Fields Corner Community Organizing Project; as an emergency services coordinator at Boston City Hospital and University Hospital; as an advocacy instructor at UMass Boston; as an adolescent Crisis Team member with the Coastal Community Counseling Center in Braintree; as a private practice psychotherapist; and as a clinical Services Team member for the Judge Baker Children's Center in Boston, the last named "one of the most important jobs I've ever held."

In 1992, she became executive director of the Children's Trust Fund. She remembers when she responded to the job-application ad. "I came home one night after an intense counseling session on child abuse, one of the most intense ever. I told my husband that I can't do this any more, that I needed a new job. Instead of a pat on the back or a glass of wine, he handed me a classified ad from the trust fund. ‘You want to prevent abuse,' he said. ‘Here's your chance.' "
Bartley never looked back. Over the years at the fund, she has dramatically increased the operating budget, developed a statewide network for parenting education and support programs, spearheaded the development and funding of a nationally recognized independent evidence-based evaluation, and developed an award winning website for parents (onetoughjob.org).

Always, though, the images of abuse linger, but she's optimistic that child abuse can be prevented in part, both in the home and at the hand of pedophiles. The headlines today disgust her, and she stresses again the critical necessity of rejecting a societal denial of the problem and focusing on solid reporting to spot the signs of abuse. Noting statistics, she points out that the average pedophile has close to 200 victims, not just one.

"Would it surprise you to walk into a bar and find an alcoholic?" Bartley asks. "Then why does it surprise some that pedophiles are drawn to places where they have access to children? We need to be far more watchful of situations where this can happen. If I left a cookie jar in the kitchen with a bunch of four-year-olds, and when I come back they all have chocolate Oreos on their faces, then shame on me!"

She says tries hard not to be consumed with the all the tragic stories of abuse. "Does it make me angry? Absolutely! But I need instead to focus on the prevention- identifying and trying to stop those throwing babies into the river." Suzin Bartley keeps filling the boat with victims, but she unendingly scours the shoreline with the eyes, ears, and heart of a lifesaver.

Greg O'Brien, a regular contributor to the Boston Irish Reporter, is president of the Stony Brook Group, a publishing and political/communications strategy company based in Brewster. The author/editor of several books, he contributes to various regional and national publications.