“When we’re making a bunch of policies and getting in political arguments, we’re not really thinking about the children.”

Mia Heredia, 23, is a Criminal Justice and African Diaspora Studies graduate student at UWM. She has served as the president of UWM’s Student Association for the last two years and is the Graduate Equity Team Lead for UWM’s Honors College. In her free time, she enjoys adding vampire books and movies to her roster, volunteering, and finding new hidden gems in Milwaukee.

Emily Kern: My first question is just what you care about generally in the world. Is there anything that’s just on your mind that you really want to see addressed?

Mia Heredia: Yeah. Child advocacy is really big for me. They are a population that we tend to overlook, and they’re at the whims of adults. I think it’s important that when we’re making a bunch of policies and getting in political arguments that we’re not really thinking about the children. We’re just thinking about them politically.

Q: Can you explain to me what child advocacy is?

A: Yeah, child advocacy is exactly kind of what it sounds like. It’s advocating on behalf of the child. I think that some folks get a little bit confused because they think that in child advocacy, you also have to advocate for the adults or anyone else in the situation. But it’s truly doing your best and implementing decisions based on what would be best for the child.

Q: Have you seen child advocacy happening on campus, such as within the education school or childcare center?

A: Not necessarily, but I will be honest, and say that I’m not completely plugged in. I do know that there has been more like advertisements and recruitment for folks to be aware, maybe just information sessions in regard to it. Again, a lot of the ideas in child advocacy involves also advocating for the adults. I’ve seen a lot of more recruitment about that. I would say indirectly, that would be the child advocacy that I’ve seen on campus.

Q: What would be the first thing you’d like to see policy makers address when drafting child advocacy legislation?

A: That is a really good question. It really depends. There’s a lot of different ways that one can take it. I think the first would be to do with the foster care system. And the way that foster families get set up, and the different case managers that get assignment. I want that to be better. Maybe not backgrounds, but a bit more screening as it pertains to the different people that are on these cases and making sure that they’re child centric. I also want the different group homes and the process entirely to be a lot less traumatic for these children who are already being put in this like super bad situation.

Q: How does the topic of child advocacy play into the current Roe v Wade debate?

A: Oh, gosh, that is a really good question. Well, I think that women and women-identified folks are grown human beings. So, if folks are attempting to control access to things with grown human beings, what do they feel they have the right to do with a population that can’t advocate for themselves. What if we just all decide that, you know, today it is access to health care as it pertains to abortion and tomorrow it’s access to vaccinations for children. What if we just stopped giving children vaccinations because we feel that it is not a healthcare right for them to have vaccinations as a country? Right? I think it really does. It plays into the patriarchal view of what the role of women and children in society should be and that might feel like a stretch, but look at the different laws that are protecting women and children… I’m sorry, the lack thereof that protect women and children. I think it does play into the larger, larger question here. If we get rid of one population’s rights, what’s to say we’re protecting any other ones’?

Q: Awesome, thank you for your time and insight.