Author Archive

I am very interested in collaborating with other organizations that are also trying to develop awareness and promote changes for greater effectiveness in prevention of child sexual abuse. I have been speaking around the country on this topic and I have confirmed the fact that most people still do not understand how easily a child can become a victim of sexual abuse and why it is critical that we put all our efforts together to focus on prevention, i.e., doing things ‘before’ it happens, not after.

I have had some success collaborating with other organizations focusing on these same issues. However, I feel that we can all do more. I have approached some organizations with the hope of collaboration, but have not received a positive response. They feel like they are doing everything they want to pursue and they do not need collaboration with others. I always get confused when I see reactions like that – why can’t we collaborate when we seem to have the same objectives?

I have also noticed that sometimes an organization becomes larger and loses the main focus that it originally started with. It seems like they just want to continue what they have been doing and do not want to get involved with something else even if that might produce better results.

As schools start up around the country for the 2018-2019 school year, I hope that parents and school staff around the nation remain diligently focused on preventing bullying at their schools. We simply cannot afford to allow any young person to have to deal with difficult psychological issues triggered by bullying. Let us allow everyone to enjoy school life in a safe environment.

Ideally every child should look forward to going back to school again around this time of the year. After a gap of three months, many typically enjoy getting back to the routine, meeting up with old friends, and making new friends. However, there are many for whom this is not at all a positive event – and that is not because they hate the teachers, or they don’t like meeting old friends, or making new ones. In most cases, these children simply do not want to go back to school again because they do not want to face bullying again.

For these children, the school is like a prison – it is not at all a safe environment to go into. I believe that many parents and school staff still do not understand how traumatizing bullying can be for some children. Every child has the right to get an opportunity to learn in a safe environment, and in my opinion, we as adults are failing miserably if even one child has to tolerate bullying when he/she is in school.

It is clear that many organizations around the nation are starting to focus on this issue of handling bullying and harassment in their work settings. Currently there are many webinars, trainings, and workshops available to help organizations deal with this issue. This is a good thing and we hope that the trend will continue in this right direction.

I am scheduled to do a webinar on Sept 19, 2018, on this topic – the title of my webinar is “Employees’ guide to responding to workplace bullying and harassment”. This webinar will be based on my book titled “How to stand up to workplace bullying and take on an unjust employer”. This book provides ideas and suggestions for both employees and employers. I intend to do another webinar at a later date focusing on what employers should know about dealing with workplace bullying and harassment.

Most successful companies understand that their success is highly dependent on how satisfied their employees are. That is why they make it a policy to make sure that bullying and harassment in the workplace is not tolerated. That is also the reason why they have appropriate training for both employees and management personnel to minimize incidents of bullying and harassment, and to be prepared to handle incidents appropriately utilizing a well-defined and well-publicized process.

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.

The behavior of a bully is somewhat similar to how Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD) torments a victim. A bully tries to establish control over the victim, and in fact that’s what OCD does as well. That is why OCD is sometimes known as the “internal bully” or the “enemy within”. It’s no wonder why bullying often triggers OCD for the victim.

Typical bullies control the victims from outside – control is one of the key reasons why bullies do what they do. It is quite likely that these bullies have had difficult home situations where they were controlled a lot at home. They often act out outside the home trying to work out their frustrations by bullying other children and controlling them. In fact when I had my interesting encounter in my adult years with the worst bully from my school days, one of the things he mentioned to me was that his negative home environment had contributed in turning him into a bully, trying to exercise control over other kids.

OCD tries to control the victim in somewhat similar fashion. It keeps making the victim feel that if he/she does not do something in a particular way, something bad will happen to them. That is the way OCD tries to control the victim from within. Eventually with the help of therapy and medication, the victim learns to neutralize the power of OCD.

However, overall the similarities are interesting, and that is why it is easy to understand why many victims of bullying end up having to deal with OCD or other anxiety disorders.

Many managers and supervisors across the country have never received training in developing communication skills. They often believe, incorrectly, that bullying employees is the only way to get them to perform. If these managers and supervisors were trained properly on effective communication, incidents of bullying and harassment in the workplace will go down drastically.

A manager or a supervisor needs to be able to communicate effectively with each and every employee within his or her group. And the same communication approach does not typically work for all employees. That is the most important thing to understand.

Employees have different personalities and come from different social, emotional or educational backgrounds. That is why it makes sense that one communication approach may not work for all employees.

Managers and supervisors who are well trained know that employees get motivated for a wide variety of reasons. Some get motivated because of financial benefits, some get motivated because of a respectable position, some get motivated because of an exciting project, some get motivated because of career opportunities, while some others may be motivated simply because of the kind of work they do. A well trained manager can then customize his/her interactions with the various employees to keep them all motivated in the workplace.

Of course, there are always some managers and supervisors who are not trainable – they will always know only one way to manage people – and that is what causes the issues in the workplace.

We all know that prevention of child sexual abuse is not an easy task, especially when in many cases the offenders are trusted adults. That is why it is even more important to make sure we don’t put children in a potentially risky situation. We can at least try to prevent the preventable situations.

That is the main point I try to make in my book titled “Father Figure – my mission to prevent child sexual abuse”. There are things that one can do to be more careful about putting children in situations that can be harmful for them.

In the true account story I describe in the book, a single mother, with 2 young daughters, starts dating a convicted child molester, without knowing that he is a convicted child molester. But then, even after learning about his recent troubling past, she continues to allow the two young daughters to come in regular contact with him. The question is whether or not this is a potentially risky situation for the kids?

We can argue about this for hours, but in my view, when we are talking about prevention, this is an excellent example of when it will be a good idea to keep the children away until the mother is much more confident about her relationship with the person. It is important to take this precaution and I believe that most people will understand if the mother decides to take precautions of this nature.

Last Sunday I had an opportunity to speak at a local church about “Bias-based bullying and mental health”. This was based on my first book titled “A Life Interrupted – the story of my battle with bullying and obsessive compulsive disorder”. I was not sure what to expect since I had not spoken in front of a church congregation before. But it turned out to be a wonderful experience.

It was the Unitarian Universalist Church of Minnetonka. I found the attendees to be extremely caring and genuinely interested in what I was speaking about. Almost all of the attendees came up to me at the end of the service and thanked me personally for taking the time to speak at the church. Most of them had extremely encouraging and supporting words for me. It was truly a very positive experience for me.

I went into their website (uucmtka.org) to read more about their background information and found some very interesting material. I read about their guiding principles and I found them all to be very open and welcoming. The following are some of their principles (from their website) that I liked the most:

The inherent worth and dignity of every person

Justice, equality and compassion in human relations

Acceptance of one another

The goal of world community with peace, liberty and justice for all

On my facebook page I post on a weekly basis on the topics covered by my three books. It appears that the topic covered by my third book (How to stand up to workplace bullying and take on an unjust employer) seems to be the most controversial. Many people agree that there are things one can do in order to fight back against workplace bullying and harassment, but there are many others who believe there is nothing one can do in situations like this.

It is probably true that in some situations there really is nothing much one can do. For example, in a small town, in a small company or in a very small business setting, a worker may not have a lot of options. In such situations it is possible that if one brings up the matter to one’s employer, it might result in termination, and with not many reasonable available options, the employee may not want to pursue the matter.

But there are many other situations where employees simply do not want to pursue the matter even if there are other options available to the employees. One reason could be that most employees are peace-loving people and just do not want to deal with the issues involved in complaining about things of this nature. Also there are employees who love their jobs so much that they do not want to rock the beat. All that is okay as long as it does not affect the employees’ mental health. I strongly believe that a person must do something to address the situation if he/she feels that her mental health is being impacted.

At many of my presentations based on my book titled “Father Figure – my mission to prevent child sexual abuse”, discussions often come up as to whether or not single mothers with young children should date convicted child molesters. This is of course a personal question that each person will need to decide based on her own situation. However, my opinion is that a single mother with young children must be extremely careful and make sure that the situation does not create any kinds of risks for her children.

If a single mother chooses to date a known child molester, then she must do so without ever involving her children or allowing them to meet her date. This statement may come across as common sense to many people, and many would argue that no one should date a known child molester to begin with!

I felt the need to specifically mention this as I have run into a similar situation with a very close friend of mine. I happened to learn from this single mother friend of mine that she had begun dating a convicted child molester. In the case of this woman, her date had pleaded guilty to groping and kissing a little girl once in a public place. Though this woman insisted that the guy had turned himself in and told her about his criminal record on their first date, I still would not recommend dating someone with any history of mistreating kids in a sexual manner.

Having said that, I would like to point out, given her choice to still date him, this woman dealt with the matter in a way that posed no risks to her children. To begin with, this woman took it upon herself to immediately inform her children’s father about her date’s criminal history. She also resolved from the start that she would never allow her date to meet her two children, until they became adults, no matter how far their relationship may progress.