If one wants to prevent something, then it becomes necessary to take some precautionary measures. It is the same thing when it comes to preventing child sexual abuse. In this case, precautionary measures include keeping an eye open for any possible red flags and following through to make sure children are not at risk of any kind of sexual misconduct.

In the story I wrote about in my book “Father Figure – my mission to prevent child sexual abuse”, I talk about a single mother (named Kim in the book), with two young daughters, starting to date a convicted child molester (named Charlie in the book). I absolutely agree that just because Charlie was convicted of a crime, it does not take away his right to start dating again. That is not a problem at all. The question really is whether or not Kim needed to be more careful about introducing her daughters too quickly to Charlie. My suggestion is that someone in Kim’s place should take a bit of time to get to know Charlie better before introducing her daughters to him.

I was a family friend and had decided to do a bit of background research on Charlie. I found a lot of information on him simply from publicly available documents. I uncovered a large number of red flags that I had shown to Kim. The red flags clearly indicated to me that there were risks involved for Kim’s daughters and that she needed to be careful about moving forward.

Prevention means doing something proactively, keeping the children’s safety in mind. I often tell people that keeping your front door open does not mean that there will be a burglary for sure, but locking the door is the right preventive move.

I am excited to have an opportunity to speak at the Utah School Counselors Association conference in Ogden, UT, on Friday October 12, 2018, on the topic of “PTSD from bullying triggers obsessive compulsive disorder”. This will be another opportunity to make the point to a group of school counselors that bullying during school years can lead to devastating mental illness for victims.

Many school counselors do understand the possible significant long term impact of bullying. However, I am aware that there are still some school staff members who do not believe that bullying can cause any significant long term damage. They believe that once you are out of school, whatever happened during the school years fade away quickly. Unfortunately that is not the case for many victims of bullying.

Every child has his or her unique personality. There are some children who can ignore the bullying and can move on without allowing it to impact themselves. They are the lucky ones. But there are many others who are not able to ignore it, and consequently, have to live with the long term impact. It’s not their fault that they are not able to ignore the bullying. The responsibility does not fall on them. The responsibility of maintaining a safe school environment falls on all school staff and the parents. It is critical that ALL school staff understand that ALL children deserves a non-threatening school environment.

I look forward to a good presentation with some interesting follow-up discussions.

Many employers do not do anything about preventing bullying and harassment in the workplace because they believe that employees have no rights and that if employees do not like the environment, they will just leave. This is why it is important for employees to learn that there are things one can do to fight back against bullying and harassment.

I wrote the book titled “How to stand up to workplace bullying and take on an unjust employer” primarily to make the point that there are things an employee can do to fight back against bullying and harassment in the workplace. Many employers simply do not want to take the trouble involved in trying to prevent bullying in the workplace and maintain a peaceful work environment. They just hope that if someone is not able to survive in their workplace environment, then they would just quit and go somewhere else.

And a lot of employees do end up doing that – they leave a hostile work environment and try to find a more acceptable workplace. This is what many employers count on. But employers do have the responsibility to maintain a safe environment for all employees. Most successful organizations take this responsibility seriously and establish and follow appropriate processes and procedures to handle complaints of bullying and harassment in the workplace. These employers realize that employees do have rights and that it will not be good for the organization if one or more employees decide to fight back.

I am excited to have an opportunity to speak at the Utah School Counselors Association conference in Ogden, UT, on October 12, 2018. The topic of my presentation will be “Prevention of child sexual abuse – the ethical challenges”. This will be another opportunity to make the point to a group of school counselors that anyone working with children in any capacity must be aware of the risks children face in the community.

I have spoken in front of school counselors on many occasions. Through these presentations and subsequent discussions I have come across several school counselors who felt that they really did not need to sit through a presentation like this. They felt that their jobs do not necessarily require them to be aware of these issues associated with child sexual abuse. I have always tried to explain to them that first of all, every adult (irrespective of what they do for a living) needs to be aware of these issues and must look out for the red flags. And secondly, anyone who works with children on a regular basis, in whatever capacity, must understand these issues well and know what to do and how to do it in case a relevant situation arises.

A victim had once told me that she had reported a sexual abuse to her school counselor, but the counselor immediately went back to her family and discussed it with the victim’s mother, who minimized the situation and denied the problem. After that incident, the victim had decided not to say anything to anybody at all. This is one of the reasons as to why school counselors need to be aware of all the issues associated with child sexual abuse.

It appears to me that most schools still are not able to get the parents involved whole-heartedly in their bullying prevention process. Over the last few years some of the schools I spoke at had arranged for me to speak to a group of parents. Interestingly in most of those cases only a few parents attended.

This is an extremely important factor because without the cooperation and assistance of the parents it is very difficult for school staff to maintain a safe environment at the school. In my book “A Life Interrupted – the story of my battle with bullying and obsessive compulsive disorder” I have included a whole chapter describing my interactions (in adult years) with the worst bully from my school days. From that most revealing encounter I came to understand that this specific bully had a very negative home life and was taking out his frustrations by bullying me and other kids.

Since then I have now come across several situations where bullies have shared with me their thoughts about why they end up bullying other kids. In many cases it is the negative family situation that drove them to act this way.

I am glad that most school staff try their best to get the parents involved in their programs. It may not be an easy thing to accomplish, but I certainly hope that they will continue their efforts to get the support they need from the parents to minimize bullying in schools.

Through my own experience in fighting successfully against wrongful termination I have discovered that there are a lot of things that employees need to learn regarding the rights they have in dealing with situations like these. Most employees seem to believe that they don’t have any rights at all. What I have learnt is that that is not true.

It is true that most states allow at-will employment – that allows an employer to terminate an employee at any time. But the point is that the employers cannot be irresponsible about this and cannot just get rid of an employee simply because he or she was bringing up some difficult issues that needed to be handled properly.

In my specific example, I was bringing up issues that were affecting me personally and were also affecting the organization negatively. Then suddenly I was terminated – it was clear to see that they did that simply because they were not truly interested in handling the issues brought up by me. That is why it became a wrongful termination.

This is the main reason why documentation is extremely important. If there is a trail of documentation (prior to the termination) that shows that there have been some conflicts between the employee and the employer, then termination could be perceived as a wrongful act.

That is why good employers make sure that all complaints and issues brought up by employees are handled according to an established process.

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.