Wyoming Governor Matt Mead joined several community and statewide partners this morning to recognize and raise awareness about child abuse.

"It's estimated that 997 children in Wyoming are victims of abuse and neglect each year," said Mead, as he proclaimed April as Child Abuse Prevention Month in Wyoming.

Afterwards, the group walked from the Hathaway Building to the downtown Cheyenne fire station to plant hundreds of blue and silver pinwheels in front of the station's mural wall.

"Child abuse is alive and well in Wyoming," said Lynn Huylar, President of Child Advocacy Centers of Wyoming. "One in four girls and one in six boys will be sexually abused by an adult sometime in their childhood and 90 percent of those children are abused by someone they know and trust."

"This is an area where we can and must do better," said Mead. "We have to make sure these cases are reported, we have to make our law enforcement, as they have done, continue to do the great job, we have to make sure that advocates are supported and we have to make sure that there is never any equivocation about whether child abuse is acceptable in Wyoming, it's not."

"We must all accept that simply talking about the problem of child abuse will not make it go away," said Huylar. "We have to work collaboratively together if we're going to make any kind of inroads in changing the face of child abuse."

Joy Greenwald, Townsquare Media
Joy Greenwald, Townsquare Media
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