About This Site
Warning: Trigger Alert.
If you have been victimized, please be aware that the contents within this site may serve as a trigger.
This site started as a single page, nearly a decade ago, to warn others about the monster in my life. You can read my story if you like, but the majority of this site is about the monsters in your life. …and how to protect your children from them.
Your Circle
Our children are most at risk from those ‘in our circle.’
When I refer to ‘your circle’ throughout this site, I am referring to those people who are;
- in your household
- in your family
- visit your house, or you visit theirs
- hang around with either your family or some of your friends
- your neighbors
- the parents, relatives, friends, and neighbors of your children’s friends
- coaches, clergy, children’s entertainers at your children’s parties, camp counselors
Really, check out just how big your circle is…and you might be surprised just how few of them you really know.
You may know the people in your household well…but just how much do you really know about who is in the homes of your children’s friends when you allow them to visit? Therein lies the risk. You may trust those parents, but what about the older siblings in that home? The neighbors?
We know that educating those in ‘our circle’ provides far greater protection for all the children in that circle than anything else we could do for prevention.
If you haven’t, start talking, questioning…and checking out the people in that circle.
…and never let your kids alone with anyone in that circle you don’t know.
A Mom’s Duty is Not Only Never Done…But Lacks Proper Support
Moms (and those mothering children)…beware.
When it comes to preventing your children from being victimized by a pedophile, it’s all on you. It’s not fair; society hasn’t afforded those raising children an adequate safety net and support system.
I get it.
It’s hard enough for each of us to utilize our own resources to get through each day.
Far too many loving, caring Moms have been targeted by abusers who pick a specific vulnerability, exploit it, and gain access to their victims.
…and make NO mistake. We ALL have areas of our lives that are vulnerable to exploitation by would-be abusers. They will search out and find that and exploit it against you and your children. The Best Mom in the world can still be a target; and it’s not your fault if you find yourself in the position of having one of these monsters target you.
This site is dedicated to YOU, Mama Bears!
Maybe you have a partner, or extended family helping you raise your kids; maybe you’re going it alone. Maybe you have full support; maybe you have none, or somewhere in between. Maybe you’ve had the benefit of good education, maybe you’ve had to learn it all on your own.
Maybe you’re overcoming your own experience from the monsters in your life; or maybe you’ve been lucky.
Every Child is At Risk
The onset of sexual abuse is a sentinel event in a long journey of cultural failure.
Sexual abuse is risk factors gone unchecked; educational opportunity not realized; environmental hazards unmitigated; familial vulnerability unsecured.
It’s not just some incompetent Mom that causes sexual abuse to happen to her child. It’s just not that simple.
Abusers choose Moms (& families) at risk, without support, economically struggling or addicted or just really overwhelmed with job hours trying hard to make ends meet. I’ts a culture that demands children learn absolute obedience to authority…without giving them the knowledge that sometimes authorities are wrong. It’s a society that teaches women to give credit for what people say, and ignore what they do.
When the abuser is from within the child’s inner family circle, it’s even easier for the abuser to COVER THEIR TRACKS ENTIRELY until they are already abusing the child.
Abusers hunt Moms as surely as they hunt children.
…and stranger danger and good/bad touch doesn’t begin to adequately address this.
The simple fact is that it is unrealistic to think that children can be taught to protect themselves from sexual abuse by older children and adults. Other adults in the children’s circles of family, neighborhoods, friends, school, and activities need to work together to keep them safe. (source: Darkness to Light Foundation)
Not just Moms.
We need to get society to awaken, activate, and step up.
You Already Know the Reality
Prevention and, when the worst happens, early intervention, is by no means easy. The odds are stacked against you. The advantage is to the monster. They can bide their time until they find the easy chance; they can show an innocent face to you, work their way into your life, and steal your child’s innocence in the time it takes you to stir dinner.
…and most of them will victimize over and over again before they ever are caught and successfully prosecuted, so most have no police record.
But…there is hope.
Awareness. Trusting Your Gut. Environmental Management. Risk Reduction. …and when that fails, early detection and intervention. That’s what I’m hoping to give you. Some tools to help you keep the real monsters away from your children.
…and a starting point for advocating for a greater prevention net for ALL children.
Support for Those Mothering Children
Whenever a child is victimized, it’s the Mother who gets battered in the media. Seems the talking heads are all too happy to lay blame at the Mother’s feet. We almost never hear the broader discussion about the web of causal factors that make sexual abuse possible…even more likely.
Society is not at all friendly to raising children. In some areas, downright hostile. Like the rate of children living in poverty. Like the second parents out there who are allowed to completely walk away from their financial obligations. With literally billions of dollars of back child support owed to their children that isn’t paid just imagine the kind of supportive environment children could be raised in with some basic social justice enforcement.
Other ‘that’s just the way it is’ realities make Moms and their children much easier prey for pedophiles.
- Absence of paid sick leave with job protection
- Lack of constitutionally protected equal pay for equal wages, leaving women more economically vulnerable
- Absence of real tax breaks for working families paying for childcare and aftercare
- Poorly funded child and family welfare services
- Alcohol and Drug Addiction that goes undiagnosed or untreated
- The untreated sexual abuse in some offenders
- Views of women and raising children in general that make abuse harder to prevent, identify, and treat.
There’s a broader discussion than blaming and shaming. The talking heads are doing ALL our children a great injustice. We deserve thoughtful discussion of how to learn from that situation, address the causative factors that led up to that abuse, and educate all parents….so it doesn’t happen over and over. Mom-Bashing Doesn’t Promote Prevention.
Its too easy to pick out one Mom out of the crowd, condemn her, her choices, her life…and sometimes, there’s a lot of validity to the criticism. But just decrying the situation with an emotionally satisfying bash-fest does nothing to prevent the situation from getting repeated to another child. …and does a GREAT disservice to the far greater majority of Moms who, despite all their best efforts, find themselves with an abuser in their child’s lives.
Armed with knowledge, spreading of socially just political will, and some basic corrections in public policy to make our great society more supportive…there’s a LOT of hope that we can make a difference.
The Dark Internet
Every parent by now must have heard that there are sex offenders on the Internet.
But a healthy mind cannot conceive of just how dark, deviant, and dangerous some of the predators are. Its a good thing that our minds just can’t go there, or we’d live in fear every minute.
But these people are out there, trying to advocate for their perversions to become mainstream thinking. They engage in activism. They train each other. …and they are always looking for possible victims.
We do need Internet users of all skill levels to help us weave a greater safety net.
Fear of Known Offenders
Vigilantism Against Known Offenders is Not OK…But Thankfully, Not Necessary.
I look at known sex offenders this way. They are the known dangerous people. They are more easily identified as the ones who should definitely not be around kids. At least we know who they are.
It’s the ones in our social circles who have yet to be identified that are the bigger risk to our children.
We don’t have to go out of our way to make known offenders lives miserable. Its a waste of our time, energy, and resources. …and, its against the law.
We just have to learn to watch for the signs that someone shouldn’t be near children, and set policies and enforcement in place so they cannot be employed or used as volunteers in places where children are present.
That takes public advocacy for public policy change. Volunteer agencies, schools, daycares, etc. should have free access to fingerprint background checks. …and if they deal with children under age 18, they should be required, federally funded, and fast.
We don’t have the political will to do this yet.В But we can change that. A little at a time.
Start by talking about it to your circle. You’ll be shocked by the amount of survivors in your circle, I promise you.
Do
- Teach your children that their body is theirs
- Teach your children the proper names of their body parts, and emphasize which of those parts are private
- Work to create a relationship where your child can tell you anything
- Know where your children are at all times
- Know who has access to the areas where your children go to daycare, school, or when visiting relatives & friends
- Get to know your children’s coaches, youth leaders, counselors, friends & their parents and family members
- Be one of the ‘adults you can count on to show up and suit up’ in your child’s activities
Don’t
- Leave your child alone until they are old enough, by law and developmentally, to stay at home
- Leave your child in the vehicle alone, ever.
- Allow your child to have a 1:1 ratio of alone time with any adult or older child without supervision. By far, MOST abuse takes place when there is a 1:1 child-adult ratio
- Allow your child to participate in overnights without checking out the ratio, who has access to your child, and who the adult in charge will be
Actions
If you can just do the following, as you are able, and encourage your circle to do the same, we CAN make a huge difference.
- When you are sent an inappropriate electronic communication, KEEP IT…and forward it as an attachment to the ‘ abuse@ ‘ address for whatever internet service provider it came from.
- Talk to your kids often about what bigger kids and adults should NOT do to them
- Know where your kids are at all times, and who they are with
- …and greatly limit or eliminate a 1:1 adult to child private ratio…there are plenty of places where children can have one on one time with an adult but be in a public place.
Finally, NEVER believe the word of a person on the sex offender list, or any of their ‘friends.’ They are on there for a reason. Probably a reason they will never be honest about.
Give the judge who put them on that list the benefit of the doubt.
8 Responses
JaneRadriges - June 14, 2009
Great post! I’ll subscribe right now wth my feedreader software!
Scylla - June 14, 2009
Great post!
I will go a step further and say there is another thing we can do as parents to help our children avoid being abused.
We can teach them the appropriate names for their body parts, so the adults who can help them if they are ever in any danger, can be warned in time to help them.
It sounds do silly, but I represented abused kids when I was training to be an attorney, and there was a case where a little girl had been told by her parents that her “parts” were called her crayon box, and her brother’s “parts” were called a crayon.
Well, you can just imagine how helpful that was to her and her teacher several years later when an older boy who had been sexually abused attacked her and she told her teacher he put his crayon in her crayon box.
I was horrified. This little girls parents had failed her simply because they failed to prepare her to tell her teacher she had been sexually attacked by an older student by giving her the right name for her sexual organs.
A similar problem emerged when I placed my daughter in pre-school. Her teacher told me that a lot of pre-school aged children engaged in masterbatory behaviors during nap-time, and that they were told not to “tickle” themselves.
I had to sit that poor teacher down and explain to her that teaching our children to call masterbation tickling is just as harmful as the crayon issue. You don’t want to teach a child to tell you that the janitor was tickling them in the hallway!! Seriously!!
Anyway… great post, great site… thank you for letting me get up on my soapbox for a moment there.
KattyBlackyard - June 15, 2009
I really like your post. Does it copyright protected?
heather - June 15, 2009
I have no problem with people sharing good ideas. If it’s for profit, however…please give credit where credit is due.
Michael - June 27, 2009
Hey, have you seen this news article?
New details about Michael Jackson’s Death Emerge
I was wondering if you were going to blog about this…
heather - June 27, 2009
I just posted a response to Michael Jackson’s Death; I know the hate mail will come but it needs to be said by more people of conscience.
Not everyone mourns for Michael Jackson.
Angela - September 8, 2009
Single mothers face one of the most challenges job in the world. Believe it or not bringing up a child without the assistance of your male partner is no easy job. This is the situation that shows who is a true caring mother and the one who simply neglects her child just to pursue her own interests neglecting the child. Though it is not an easy job, mothers should for the time-being, put a pause to their materialistic hunger and take the child upbringing as the primary focus in life. Those women who have done this have brought up the best of men in the world and led a happy and fulfilling life. On the other hand there have been women who neglected their children in their tender years just to repent later in their lives.
heather - September 20, 2009
Single parents do face great challenges.
…and our society does not do near enough to helping them. Paid sick leave with job protection allows sick children to be cared for by a parent instead of someone else. Health coverage that also covers prevention and mental health services helps victims get the help they deserve. High Quality preschools, head start, public schools help children from struggling families get the education they need to break the cycles of poverty and addiction that make a new generation easy targets for abusers.
There are public policy changes that can make this world better for our children. We can do better. We MUST do better.
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