Preventing Child Sexual Abuse Starts and Ends with You

Don’t expect society or even the president to change things for the better. There will always be children who are sexualized. There will always be the idealized woman that our children attempt to be like. There will always be the “bad” dude that bros want to emulate as well. These are circular arguments.

We trade the naked girl for the fully covered up one, but abuse remains the same throughout time. Our obsession with sexualized kids promotes sexualized kids even when they are not being sexually objectified. One is more open, the other is in secret, but the abuse still happens.

We seldom see little girls on runways in swimsuits, but all that still happens. It’s just more dangerous now because it happens only in private. The thin girlish woman is out, and the big girl is in, but all that is changed is the body type we idealize. Now, men need skinny bodies, six-pack abs to please our plus-sized girlfriends.

We, too, want to be hairless (our heads and bodies included). My body is looking more 25, than 54. That is good, and that is bad in some ways because I am not 25. I cannot say the same about my face. I have to live with that.

Nothing changes, really, in part, because we are too afraid to face the reality. Humans are stuck in a moment, not in history, so we are on repeat. That’s okay, but I want to discuss what we can do to prevent child sexual abuse in a realistic and practical way. No, President Trump, even Elon Musk, with all his power, are helpless to change sexual interest to a purely Puritanical one. To try is to make things much worse.

Here, though, is what we can do to reduce the likelihood that your child becomes a victim.

Be Humble

We all are know-it-alls on social media, and we keep that defense because, in secret, most of us are just not that confident. But so much of confidence lies in the act, not the reality. Acting confident can get you a job, but that does not mean you know how to do it.

I work in child sexual abuse prevention. My job is to assess the risk a person has of reoffending against a child sexually. It’s a big responsibility. Yes, I am in child sexual abuse prevention. I am on the front lines. I know every detail of the crime. I know the person’s history that has committed it, and I understand child sexual exploitation laws and the struggle for everyone involved: the victim, the offender, their families, and their communities. Those who offend are not monsters. They may be the neighbor you like, not the guy on Dateline or CNN. They may be your dad, your husband, or your sister.

Yet, I must, too, be humble. So should you. The first mistake parents and guardians can make is to assume they know how to keep their child safe. You don’t. You cannot. But we can do our best to mitigate risk without becoming obsessive-compulsive about it. We have to accept that there will always be some danger.

Here is an example. A parent says that they will not allow their child to have a phone. But her friends have phones, and who do you think is the star of the show on her friend’s channel? Your kid, but you wouldn’t know because she does not have a channel. The boys took a picture of her body and posted it on Snapchat.

You cannot monitor because she does not have a phone. Such can make a kid even more vulnerable. I’ve seen kids as young as seven who have their channels without their parents’ knowledge. Kids are very computer savvy. Don’t expect social media platforms to keep kids safe because they are amoral. Young females can make social media platforms a huge money. Girls, in particular, bring a lot of hidden profit to social media. There would be much less social media without primarily young girls being there. Girlhood has always been a major drive in art and media. That will not subside because girls and women are important, and their interest in them can be traced back to biological and evolutionary necessity.

Communication

Humans suck at communication. I do, you do, everyone does. Even communication experts suck at it. We are inconsistent. The best of us, those experts, get tired, emotional, and lose focus at the worst moments. Yet, we must try.

Never, ever, shut your kid down if they want to talk to you. Do not be so strict because if they are afraid of you, they may be less afraid of those willing to take advantage of them. As Kerry Cohen put it in her book Dirty Little Secrets, if a dad sees his teen daughter with a hickey on her neck and talks to her, yells at her, and grounds her, what he did was shut down all future communication with her.

Next time, she will learn how to keep dirty little secrets from her dad. Instead, if he tells her, “Well, given the hickey, you must have had a good time?” She will likely say, “Dad!” and walk away. But she will likely come back, especially if he says, “Well, let’s talk about it.” She then says, “You know, Dad, I didn’t really like it. It hurt.”

Kids are smarter than we give them credit for. They just need us to give them the opportunity. This is one of the most important things a parent can do. Establish trust. Your kid will screw up. So will you, but she has a better excuse. She’s just learning what love and sex are. You are a pro. Don’t shut your kid down. Your son may say, “Dad, I used K2 the other day. I didn’t like it, but I kind of want to do it again.” That is a lot better than a knock at your door by the police. No, you are not your kid’s buddy, but that does not mean they should be afraid to tell you embarrassing stuff. Such fear leaves the door open for a lot of abuse.

Substance Use

The National Institute of Health notes that about 1 million kids per year are abused as a result of substance use by their parents and guardians. Remember that this is one million kids per year, and that is the reported amount. Unreported cases could be 10-, 20-, 30-times higher because abuse is difficult to prove, especially emotional, psychological, and sexual. What we do know is that substance use is a major factor in child abuse. Dad is super when he is sober. When he is drunk, he sexually assaults his daughter, or he hits his wife and attacks his so,n who’s trying to defend his mom. Dad is a dad sometimes, and a terror other times. That is too much on a child, or any person. Such has irreversible lifelong effects on kids.

Almost every single guy with a sex offense that I have worked with suffered from severe child neglect or abuse. In my area, at least 30% of them were sexually abused, many witnessed this abuse as a result of a sibling being harmed, and almost all were alcohol related. No matter how much people try to play down that alcohol or drugs are not a factor in sexual abuse, such is a misnomer. Substance use plays a major role in child sexual abuse. Many men and women with offenses were victims as children. They were child sexual abuse victims, but that gets played down by the media. They offend against a child, and often use alcohol and substances. The cycle continues.

There is no need to perpetuate boogiemen or “pedophiles.” Nothing is more abusive to children than alcohol use. Such lowers inhibition and increases sexual risk among children and adult victims. While being sexually attracted to a child is a factor in abuse, those who use substances have a much larger impact overall.

A parent struggling with substance use must get help. Their children’s health will depend on that. According to the Weitzman Institute, a woman who drinks one glass of wine per day is using alcohol heavily, and such can have long-term health consequences.

We may ban child models in swimwear, but no one will ever ban alcohol, even though alcohol harms so many kids. A child model can make us uncomfortable, but alcohol makes us feel good. We can back that up factually. People want alcohol regardless of harm, so it is up to us to keep its effects out of our children’s lives. No matter how many kids get compromised or killed due to alcohol, our society will never ban it.

The Keeping Children, Children Mistake

If children were supposed to stay children, then they would. Many well-intentioned adults have not dealt appropriately with their childhood trauma and want to keep kids, kids because they feel their childhood was taken from them. This is a mistake. Kids grow up, and they do so quickly, or they should. The point is to be appropriate, age-appropriate, that is. But what is appropriate will vary by culture, community, and family.

I am a huge fan of 4H. Though I did not grow up with 4H and regret that, I did live on a tiny farm. Kids in 4-H learn to deal with the cycle of life. They raise animals from birth to the slaughterhouse. No one sugar coats things for them. They understand that the boy horse mates with the girl horse so that she has a baby horse. They often witness this. They know the “fifth leg” is a penis and find it gross. They see the birth. They help the baby breathe; they raise it and learn about prolapsed uteruses and rectums. They care for the babies, learn responsibility, and then take them to compete and auction them off at the 4–H carnival in the summer. There, they must face loss. They don’t place or not as high as they would like, or that pretty nine-year-old girl won first because she is prettier than they are. Adults are human after all. They have to say goodbye to an animal they love, knowing that that animal might be on someone’s plate in a few weeks.

Such teaches the reality of life in a way that is tough but kind and rewarding, too. They have an idea of sex and in life in general, but no one had to take advantage of them. They know what a penis and vagina are. They saw that the bull became a steer, and that the horse lost his nuts.

Children are meant to grow up and learn about relationships and sexuality. If they are kept children, then they are much more likely to end up being victims of child sexual abuse. If we fetishize little girls as angels, we are making them more vulnerable to abuse. They are often told to keep secrets or to call their private areas something other than what they are. Penis and vagina are appropriate, anatomical terms. If children know this, then if someone is telling them to call these “something else,” they will already be alerted that something is amiss. If a stork still brings the baby, then children have no idea how a baby is born, and can be more easily manipulated.

While programs like 4H are not child abuse proof (nothing is), the skills kids learn keep them occupied, knowledgeable, and help them build confidence. Such can make them less likely to be ideal victims for abuse.

The Known-Knowns

We all seem to know survivors. We may be one of them, but one drawback to an otherwise very needed movement to give voice to female survivors of abuse was that we all (men included) started to vomit up our trauma publicly on social media. People got the message that those of us who did so needed our validation. The problem is that survivors’ statements became science.

In other words, we could not disagree even if they said something that was misinformation. If someone used science to correct them, then that person was hunted down and criticized. The result is that their known-known is that if a girl wears an outfit that society deems inappropriate, pedophiles everywhere will attack her. This is a totally false notion because those attracted to elementary school kids are attracted to kids, not kids dressed to look adult. Such typically appeals to typical heterosexual males and females. This is why the girls of the popular show Dance Moms wore fewer clothes than their moms. Though women and the occasional man may like the mama drama, most were looking at the girls. Yet such programs or kids’ dance wear or swimwear ads have very little to do with sexual offending. If anything, they are just used by men and women alike as a fantasy or an interest. What we know about fantasy in my business is that people seldom ever act on it illegally. So, while such things can affect a girl’s self-esteem if we glamorize only one female child’s body type, such would have very little impact on sex offending against children.

People get locked up looking at illegal images, and no matter how maddening Netflix’s Cuties made a viewer or some overzealous prosecutor in Texas, such programs—child models included—are not a cause of child sexual abuse. They are representations of taste for some people and legal coping mechanisms for others. We can make them abusive by saying they are, even though they are not. And if you were in my business, you would know exactly what is harmful. Child sexual abuse material is horrid, not inappropriate. Sexually assaulting a child is not equivalent to a competitive modern child dancer dancing to Mariah Carey’s “Santa Baby” while wiggling her hips. One is horrid abuse, the other an artistic performance by a child dancer.

In our obsession to protect children, lawmakers have taken advantage of parents and children to push their twisted agendas. Every little girl becomes erotic. Every little girl is pornographic, from head to toe. A child cannot even pose today without someone cutting the picture or editing it because we cannot see a foot, a rear end, or anything below her waist. Such only ups the ante on the dark web and fuels the taboo. Look no further than some countries afar to see how covering the body can lead to horrid abuse of females. It’s just that no one sees it. In Iran, if a young girl is arrested for a severe offense (that is anything but severe), they cannot kill a virgin. In one instance, the girl was 15 but was a “communist.” They forcibly married her to a guard. The guard raped her. Then they executed her. Iran is obsessed with covering women’s bodies. Why are grown men so obsessed? Why are they destroying women and girls by perpetuating the lie that they are trying to protect them? We may be taking the same path here. I think we are.

Women and girls do not get sexually assaulted because of what they are wearing or doing. To believe that is to believe the same thinking errors that put men I work with in the offending position. They made a choice, hurt someone, and blamed parents and the kid as a form of moral reasoning. He molested her because he decided to molest her. He did so due to the loss of his war he’s been fighting. Whether she was naked or dressed like a nun makes no difference. When it comes to touching others, the responsibility is with the toucher. If men want to be manly, they can start by taking responsibility for their actions.

The known-knowns we believe are not only false, but such can also increase the likelihood of more offending. I often feel that we want men who sexually offend to stay sex offenders, give them that title for life, because it’s not about kids. We just want to be right, even at the cost of children. In a disturbing and sinister way, the society wants them to reoffend and does all it can to do so, setting endless roadblocks in their and their families’ way. Somehow, if they get their lives back, it means that the abuse wasn’t so bad. In truth, the only way forward for an offender or victim is through healing and forgiveness. There is no other way.

The most important point of the known-knowns is this: it’s not what your kid is wearing that is the problem. It’s how she is judged for what she is wearing that is the problem. Girls and women are largely seen as pornographic, pleasers of men, the little chick and the big chick, the prostitot or the prostitute, the sesame street walker or the sex worker. It’s not the dress that is the problem, or the lack of a dress. It’s society’s perception. Nudity is no more sexual than a woman in a dress. We just perceive one as bad and the other as good.

Identification with Children

Identifying with kids is not necessarily a problem. We want our children’s teachers, school bus drivers, and coaches to be able to relate to kids. The goldfish funeral is critical. If you brush it off, that shows your lack of identifying what is important to your child. Don’t expect your six-year-old to value your business meeting more than their goldfish, which taught them their first real lesson of life … death. Your business meeting can wait.

I want to share a story about a man who is attracted to children, but what he is sharing here is not harmful, though it may disturb you that he is a pedophile. No, he has not offended against a child. At least we had no evidence of this, and given this person’s position, it would be next to impossible for him to hide it. He, though, lives overseas. He said that he is a musician, and one of his favorite things during the year is to watch the kids’ recitals. He points out that it’s not sexual at all. He just enjoys watching them play, getting over their nervousness. But he could not help but realize that he seemed to be the only person enjoying it. “When I looked at the parents, they were miserable. They did not want to be there. Whenever their kid was done, they’d just leave before the event was finished.” This was very disturbing for him. “Do they really love their kids?”

I could not help but see myself during my daughter’s dance recitals. I, too, loved watching the kids dance; their facial expressions were the best, and those that looked like deer in headlights had me nervous for them. But the one guy near me just kept saying, “I cannot stand this. I hate this,” and went on and on like a baby. I thought to myself, here your daughter has spent a whole year on this dance, and she wants to show you, her father, and all you do is whine like a baby because you want to go home and probably look at porn. Whether he wants to look at porn or not, his behavior was offensive. He clearly had no empathy or connection to his child.

I see this often with some parents. They don’t want to identify with their children. I saw it as a school bus driver. My manager could not understand why “you care.” She said, “Why do you care? They are other people’s kids.” Who cares if someone runs them over? They are other people’s problems. This angers me also. If parents don’t identify with their kids, then children will be much more susceptible to abuse. Parents will never see the warning signs. They are just not present. In the man’s case and my own, we are not identifying because of abusive or exploitative reasons. We could, and I will get to that, but this can be a good thing. My point is that identifying with children is not just pedophilic. So, while one could struggle with identification or sexualizing, they can learn to keep boundaries.

The more I practiced such in my own life, the stronger they became. I can have setbacks. I am human, but those setbacks are still within my boundaries. As I will note shortly, we all need freedom, but we also need to have structural boundaries around our freedom that are ideally self-placed and managed.

Identifying with children can be very important, but know the boundaries. You should not let the coach take the kids for the weekend unless you are going. If the bus driver is only giving Suzie candy, then there is an issue. If a coach is spending too much time with one kid and not the others, that is a red flag. Private lessons or photo shoots need to have the parent present.

Identification with children should be in the child’s best interest. Such should not benefit me, the musician, coach, or your school bus driver alone. Mutual benefit can be fine, I like kids, so I drive school buses, or I love children, so I read to them. There is mutual benefit for all parties, but the focus is on the child’s well being.

Freedom Within a Structure

Kids need structure, even if they rebel against it. Structure makes them feel safe and secure; however, they need freedom within that structure. A teenage girl may need to experiment with “looking sexy” or “looking good.” Most likely, she is showing off for her other girlfriends. They are challenging each other. She has to figure this stuff out on her own, with some guidance.

Little girls can be dancers or models, but the dancer should not be dancing in a bar, and the model should not be strutting on a runway with Jeffrey Epstein in the audience. They can be dancers and model,s but have to be secure in their environments.

Though such may be viewable on social media, it is important to remember that posting on social media takes the dance and modeling out of context. Then people are free to use them the way they will. We cannot control other people or their thoughts. It’s a waste of time even trying. This does not mean that child sexual abuse material is okay. It means that most of the kids online are not engaged in exploitation at the level of child abuse. Such is only fodder for manipulative politicians who take advantage of our feelings and exploit our children for their personal agendas.

Our pools, beaches, and playgrounds are mostly safe. There are exceptions, but we all can play a role. As a man, I feel it is my responsibility to keep kids safe in my community. Regardless of whatever feelings or struggles I personally have, it is my job and the job of other men to be sure our girls and boys can explore, play, grow, and be happy in a safe and secure neighborhood. That is what I wish I had growing up, that someone besides my mom would have given a damn about me, looked out for me. Though I did not get that, I want to be sure the kids in my community get care as much as I can help in an appropriate way. We have really lost our sense of community and have been replaced with a narcissistic-psychopathic anti-social ideology.

It’s Not About Feelings, It’s About Choices

Anyone can offend a child. Few people plan on offending against a kid; only the most dangerous people do, the ones who make the headlines. We are all capable of taking advantage. It is human nature to be selfish and predatory. Our large frontal cortices can save us from being lions. Why do the guys who look at legal images of kids stay there and don’t go to child sexual abuse material? What about the pedophiles that don’t offend? How do they manage? We know what sends men and women over the edge, but what keeps so many from going over the edge? If we scare and humiliate such people, we fail to find what actually keeps kids safer.

Yet, I still need to emphasize that though attraction to children is a factor in sexual abuse recidivism rates, sexual abuse recidivism rates are very low. They always have been. No rate is lower than murder. If you woke up and found yourself only attracted to 9-11-year-old girls or seven-year-old boys, life would get very challenging. You’d want help, but there would be no therapist you could trust. They simply don’t have the training. What if the people you were attracted to were illegal to look at or associate with? I am asking you to walk in another’s shoes for a moment.

Yes, your suicidal ideation would go way up, and life would consist of grief and fear for you. You’d want to tell, but you cannot. So, you are a liar. Everyone says so, but you don’t want to be a liar. You try to find ways to deal with it, but realize the internet is a danger zone. Yet, being with actual kids seems more dangerous, so you look online. You are crippled with shame and fear. The anger and self-hatred build.  You start to use drugs and take more and more. Others don’t understand why you cannot change. They say you are not trying hard enough. You should just settle or kill yourself. Then you go to the dark web. The police kick down your door a month later. You looked at child sexual abuse material, and that is harmful. You are now a monster.

I am guessing that you look at adults online with no fear at all. But what if they were illegal to look at? What if it were illegal to have a relationship with another adult? How would you live? Work? Play? What would you do if you could never have the human intimacy that people need? Why would a person choose this life path? What is in it for them? Would you choose to be the most hated person in the world if such were a choice?

It’s easy to hate folks, especially those who disgust us, those we have so little investment in. That is common, but we seldom want to put ourselves in the position of the person we hate. If we hate, we don’t know enough about the person we hate. Feelings, sexual feelings,s or attraction are not choices. But we can learn not to make a choice that harms a child or other person. It is important to note that many people who offend against a child are not pedophilic. It was an opportunity. They want women, but they can get a girl more easily.

We can make choices. I chose not to be my dad. I can drink and drive, but I choose not to. I don’t use alcohol or drugs, ever. What is important is that we help people, support them, and then they are more likely to make better choices. Remember that attraction is not a choice, but offending is. We can take the path of hate and violence, or one of responsibility and compassion. It just takes more work to do the latter. So, learn about these issues from responsible sources, not in an eco-chamber that only reinforces our prejudices and blind spots.

Your Mental Health

Look in the mirror. What is the one thing you really wish you had as a child? Be sure to give your child that one thing, especially. If you are not well enough to take care of yourself, then you are not going to take care of your kids and be there when they need you. You may also become the offender. Most men that I work with who have child sex offenses are not pedophilic. They were overwhelmed and were unable to work through the past trauma they’ve experienced. Many suffer from very low self-esteem, and a few are psychopathic and dangerous. Media outlets focus only on the latter. Abusing children is not okay, but creating the monster myth does nothing to really help. It gives us only tunnel vision. Everybody has a story, and in learning these stories, only then can we create a safer society. Know your own story first and be willing and able to sit with it and be content. Then you can be a better parent to your child.