Prevention means making sure that children are not put in a situation that could be risky for them. This means that everyone including family members, friends, neighbors, and children’s service providers must all be extra careful in making sure that children are protected from possibly harmful situations.
In the true account story I write about in my book “Father Figure – my mission to prevent child sexual abuse”, I describe some of the not-so-positive experiences I had in dealing with family members and with child protective services to help prevent a situation that could have possibly led to child sexual abuse.
Family members were either somewhat reluctant to get involved or rather slow to act on it. I was a family friend and therefore was not able to take any direct action. Fortunately, after a lot of effort, I was able to get some family members to take action.
My experience with the child protective services was also somewhat confusing. Interestingly they were always very attentive and interested in listening to me whenever I called them, but somehow there was no follow-up action. Eventually I got the message that they don’t always put a lot of priority for a situation where something bad has not happened yet. I got the feeling that they would like to respond to every such situation if they could, but apparently they did not have the resources to follow all possible preventive situations. I hope this can change in the near future so they are able to follow up on all preventive situations as well.