Jen Lilley Quotes

I want to set up orphanages for underprivileged and abused children.

My husband and I have been involved with foster youth since our early 20s. Right out of college and not yet married, we spent weekends mentoring a family of young girls.

Child abuse and neglect offend the basic values of our state. We have a responsibility to provide safe settings for at-risk children and facilitate permanent placement for children who cannot return home.

The Heart Gallery premise is very simple. It is a special traveling exhibit of photographs featuring Los Angeles foster youth, designed to highlight the need to find loving adoptive families for waiting children.

The truth is this: Brutalized, victimized children invariably will brutalize and victimize when they grow up. Is our only response to this the certain promise that we will penalize them when they do? Or will we commit to keeping our children safe from brutality and victimization?

All anti-abortion protesters should be presented, on the spot, with an application to sign up as foster parents. They should also be given the names of children in their area in need of adoptive parents. And if they won't sign or volunteer, they should shut up.

I went to a number of foreign countries, and during whenever I went, I would try to go to an orphanage or a home for children. And I was seeing thousands of kids around the world that needed homes.

Many kids in foster homes have a lot of emotions that are hard to get out. It's important to let them know they can make a difference in the community.

My dad works in child protection and he's spent many, many years in that line of work.

My impression, having been in the Norwegian government for several years, is that taking a child into care is an extremely serious decision which is really taken as a last resort, when the situation warrants it, for the well-being of the children.

If I did have the impulse to be a parent, I would adopt - or foster.

I've always been concerned with what happens to children in our society when there's nobody left to take care of them.

I wanted to write with emotional honesty and tell a story people could connect with. And I wanted people to know how the foster system in America fails children; and how, at 18, they fall through the cracks. Then we can all work together and give support.

My dad has spent 20 years of his life working in child protection and writing policy for organisations across Australia in order to recognise and safeguard against abuse.

I was put in White City children's home when I was 15.

My wife and I are foster parents.

I grew up with an extremely abusive father. As a mother, I wanted to protect my own children from exposure to violence. When I found out one of my daughters was in an abusive relationship, it broke my heart. Finally, she left him ?- but only after his abuse started spreading to the children.

We ought to regard the breaking of a child's spirit as a sin against humanity.

I was sent to a camp in Maryland for three weeks when I was nine years old, and that was my first training on how to sexually please men. I was through a training course, like a seminar…. I was taught to talk to older men and encouraged to become friendly with older men and eventually, when I was old enough, I was sent out into what they called the operational field, and I would be photographed [in sexually compromising scenes] with [foreign] government and agency officials

Those who are beaten become beaters.

There is a special place in hell for people who prey on children. I’ve yet to see a valid explanation, and I have no reason to doubt the victims' accounts.

I was worried if you adopted a foster child, someone from the birth family could still come and take her back. I was afraid that any child in foster care might have suffered such trauma or neglect that she would be impossible to reach. I'm not proud of these fears. But I understand now when others ask me the same questions.

I had a brief period of questioning whether I should perhaps adopt a child. And my New Yorker editor, Henry Finder, was horrified by the notion.

More than 30 years ago, when I had embarked upon the fight against child labour, it was not even considered an issue worth any discussion. It was accepted as a way of life in India, much like it was in other countries. Today, no country or business or society can throw this issue away.

I have a family member who was in the foster system briefly, and so I've kind of grown up knowing about it myself.