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In order to be able to prevent child sexual abuse it is critically important that family members as well as our systems are able to develop and maintain a preventive mindset. This means that both family members and systems such as child protective services are able to focus on preventive measures that would minimize risks for children.

Here are a few examples of what a preventive mindset means for family members:

• Get to know the person well before allowing contact with the children
• Perform a thorough background check before allowing interactions with the children
• Supervise the interactions to make sure the children are not being exposed to inappropriate behavior
• Time is of the essence
• Keep in mind that service providers such as Child Protective Services are typically much more responsive if a concern is brought forward by a family member

In the true story I describe in my book “Father Figure – my mission to prevent child sexual abuse”, I felt that Child Protective Services did not react in a timely manner in a preventive situation likely because the concern was brought forward by me, a bystander family friend. I hope that CPS will try to make some changes so such concerns are acted upon with a greater sense of urgency.

Schools need to continue to focus on prevention of bullying, rather than just responding to incidents of bullying reported by the students or other bystanders. And to be able to prevent bullying, it is important to understand why bullies do the bullying, and then address those issues. Otherwise bullying will continue ruining lives of victims.

One of the most crucial things I wrote about in my book “A Life Interrupted – The Story of My Battle with Bullying and Obsessive Compulsive Disorder” is what I learned about why bullies mistreat other children. I had a very interesting encounter, in adult years, with the worst bully from my school years. I was pleasantly surprised that I was able to connect with him after so many years. This encounter told me a lot of about what all was going on in his life and I understood why he became a bully.

Basically he became a bully because of a lot of negative things were going on in his life that he had no control of. That prompted him to bully other kids and made him feel like he had some control. I honestly believe that if he had received appropriate support regarding the other negative things in his life, it is very likely that he would not have turned into a bully. This is why it is critical for school staff to keep a close eye on the bullies and work closely with their parents and provide the support they need so they won’t continue their mistreatment of other children.

Bullying and harassment in the workplace can have a significant impact on the victims in terms of emotional wellbeing. There are people who are having to seek treatment from licensed mental health professionals to be able to deal with their mental health issues cause by workplace bullying and harassment. This is something that needs to stop.

There are employees who are able to put up with the bullying and harassment and are able to not let it bother them significantly. They are able to ignore it and move on. They are able to stick it out during the work hours and then are able to enjoy the non-work hours without any issues. They are the lucky ones.

However, there are many other employees for whom it is not possible to ignore such irresponsible behavior at the workplace. It bothers them significantly and it eventually affects them during their non-work hours as well. When they go home, they are extremely stressed and are not able to enjoy any relaxing hours. They remain anxious for the next workday coming up within a few hours. This eventually can develop into significant mental health issues for them requiring professional help.

All of this can be avoided if the companies make sure that bullying and harassment at the workplace is simply not acceptable.

Adults around children must understand that there is no guideline as to how much preventive effort is enough to make sure that there will not be any child sexual abuse. That is exactly the reason why putting in continuous limitless efforts for prevention is the only way to maximize their chances of remaining safe.

The main idea is that we never stop looking for preventive measures to maximize safety for the children around us. There is no such thing as enough preventive measures. The point I try to make is that there are always new situations coming up in a child’s life that one needs to be aware of. Also, even old “trustworthy” relationships can sometimes turn into negative encounters. That is why it is always necessary to keep your guards up and keep an eye constantly open for red flags.

This can often be very difficult for family members. It can be very difficult for a family member to accept the fact that another family member might be causing some risk for one of the children, or another family member is not taking appropriate preventive measures to protect his or her children. That is why in my book “Father Figure – my mission to prevent child sexual abuse” I have tried to make it clear that family members have a significant responsibility in this regard.

A school should be a fun place to go to for all children. As a minimum the children should have the right to expect the school environment to be a safe one. Sometimes a child does not want to go to school because he or she had not done the home work that needed to get done. But they should never feel like not going to school because of the fear of bullies.

There are still many schools around the country where bullying continues to be active and the school environment is not safe for all children. To me this is absolutely unacceptable. Kids sometimes do not want to go to school because of some learning related issues such as home work and/or other work while at school – this is something the parents would have to deal with anyway. This is a normal situation for many children and is not a bad thing. The process of educational learning is an important activity for all children.

But on top of that some children are also having to deal with the fear of being bullied. Kids should not have to deal with that. It is the responsibility of the adults around the children to provide a safe learning environment for all kids. It is not necessary for children to learn how to deal with mistreatment from bullies. Some adults will say that life is tough and children must learn to deal with it. But I don’t agree – if they have to deal with this at such an early age, it can often create extremely difficult emotional and psychological issues for them. We simply cannot continue to allow such mistreatment.

In most workplace bullying situations, it’s typically an employee being harassed by a supervisor or a manager. In most of these situations the manager or the supervisor never had any training in managing employees. A person who has been a good employee can often get promoted to become a manager. But a good employee, without appropriate training, doesn’t always make a good manager.

All employees expect that when they work hard and do well, they will someday be considered for promotions. However, in many cases, there aren’t that many positions available that one can get promoted to. Most often, the only promotion track available to employees is the supervisory track – they can get promoted to become a Team Leader or a Supervisor or a Manager. This is where the problem lies. Many good employees do not have the right training or aptitude to become a good supervisor.

This is why many companies are working hard to create a non-management promotion track for employees. That means that good employees who might not have the aptitude to become managers or supervisors, can still be promoted to non-managerial positions with greater responsibilities. These companies are trying to make sure that getting promoted to managerial positions is not the only way an employee can get ahead in his or her career. I think it is important for companies to try to focus on this to make sure good employees who are not suitable for managerial roles can feel satisfied with greater and greater non-managerial responsibilities.

It is important to understand that in order to be able to prevent something one would first need to have a “preventive mindset”. That is absolutely true when it comes to preventing child sexual abuse. If we are continuously focused on looking for things to do “before” something bad happens, there is always a chance that it might be prevented.

This is one of the main points in my book titled “Father Figure – my mission to prevent child sexual abuse”. Whether it was dealing with family members or with organizations like child protective services or law enforcement, it seemed to me that there was no priority given to ‘preventive measures’.

It took a lot of effort on my part to convince the family members to take some essential precautionary steps that only family members can take. Even after agreeing to do something about the situation, it took a long time for the family members to start the process of taking some action.

For child protective services, it became clear to me after a few conversations that their priority was to attend to situations where something had already happened. I got the feeling that they did not have the luxury of attending to a situation where nothing bad hadn’t happened yet. I got the same feeling from law enforcement. It became clear to me that they too were more focused on attending to situations where things have already happened rather than to situations where bad things have not happened yet. Once we are able to put more focus on taking preventive measures, we should be able to reduce incidents of child sexual abuse significantly.

Bullying often triggers OCD (obsessive compulsive disorder) for victims because there is a lot of similarity between a bully and OCD. They both try to control the victim and make him/her do things against their wills. That is why OCD is sometimes known as the Enemy Within.

Question often comes up as to why do the bullies do the bullying? I have firsthand knowledge from at least one bully. In my first book “A Life Interrupted – the story of my battle with bullying and obsessive compulsive disorder” I describe an interesting face-to-face encounter I had in adult years with the worst bully from my school days. From my discussions with him I understood that one of the main reasons why he became a bully was because of the treatment he received at home. His home life was not pleasant at all and he felt controlled a lot of the times. Therefore, he felt the need to control others so he could feel important, something that he did not feel at home.

Later through my speeches around the country, I have come to meet a lot of bullies and victims of bullying – they all confirmed that “control” is one of the key factors. This feeling of being controlled can then easily get transformed into OCD. It tortures the victims in a very similar fashion. It makes the victims do things that they don’t really want to do. The only way the victims can get control of their OCD is to learn how to ignore this internal bully. That is what can be achieved through medication and therapy.

All employers have a responsibility towards their employees. Just because the employees get paid, it does not mean that they have to work in a hostile environment. There are many people out there who feel extremely stressed at work because of workplace bullying and harassment, and that in turn affects their personal lives. This has to stop.

That is why I wrote my book titled “How to stand up to workplace bullying and take on an unjust employer”. I wanted to make the point that the process of fighting back was not easy, but it was worth it. Whenever I put in a comment on my Facebook page or on Linkedin, I get comments from both directions. A lot of people support my views and believe in fighting back. But there are also many who seem to believe that it is not useful to fight back – they believe that either you tolerate the mistreatment and keep working in that same place or just quit and take another job.

I do realize that situations are not the same for everyone. For some people there truly isn’t any other alternative other than just tolerating the mistreatment. But I believe that if at all possible, it is important to fight back. Because that is the only way employers will learn that something needs to be done to keep employees satisfied. In my case, I did win a settlement, but more importantly I believe that the organization has learnt that it needed to do more to make sure this kind mistreatment does not occur in the future.

There is still not a lot of dedicated efforts put in by our society to prevent child sexual abuse. Somehow we still don’t seem to want to deal with this issue as a major priority. For example, I have talked with various school officials across the country, and I find that this is still not a high priority topic for school officials. This needs to change.

Last November, there was a major conference of school counselors in Kentucky. I was invited to present a couple of sessions at the conference as well as conduct a pre-conference workshop. My presentations were going to be on the topics of “long term impact of bullying” and “prevention of child sexual abuse” based on my first two books. The pre-conference workshop was going to be on prevention of child sexual abuse. It turned out that the workshop was cancelled because of lack of interest in the topic.

Also, out of my two presentations, the one on “prevention of child sexual abuse” had very few attendees. It became clear to me that most school counselors do not see this as an important topic. I do believe that schools do need to work hard to establish the fact that everyone, and especially school staff dealing with children on a daily basis, must be aware of all issues associated with prevention of child sexual abuse. Children often look at school counselors as trustworthy adults outside their immediate family. It is important for counselors to be aware of all the issues just in case a child shares something that could pose a risk to the child.