Mar 18, 2019

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.

 

© 2017 - Sumi Mukherjee
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