She would be like every other 12-year-old, going to school and everything, but at night . . . she slept on the floor instead of in her bed. She said, "When the lights go off, all of these thoughts keep coming into my head and I can't go to sleep."

"THESE THOUGHTS," EXPLAINS Jo Blum, director of Denver's Families First crisis center, were of sexual abuse by the boyfriend of the girl's mother. The child had no safe home when Families First intervened and gave her a place to stay while they helped find her a permanent, stable home. Thanks to Families First, the twelve-year-old is now in the custody of her grandmother in Kansas. When she left the agency she wrote a thank-you note, Blum recalls. "It said, `We are all family in some way.'...