While speaking around the country on the topic of prevention of child sexual abuse (CSA), based on my second book “Father Figure – my mission to prevent child sexual abuse, I have met many individuals and service providers who are genuinely interested in and focused on prevention of CSA. That gives me hope that if we continue our efforts, we would see some changes in our systems that will be more effective for prevention.
Many of these individuals are dedicated workers who truly care about the children and their welfare. However, the organizations they work for aren’t always able to focus as much on “prevention” since in most cases there aren’t enough workers who can handle all the immediate crisis situations, and in addition, can also focus on preventive situations. It is often a budget issue as has been discussed before. Hopefully we will see some changes in the near future since many of these workers believe that if they were able to focus more on prevention, many of the actual abuse cases might not have happened.
The good thing is that more and more people are starting to focus on prevention. I have been to several conferences where a large number of sessions have been focused on prevention. Let us hope that this trend continues so we can see some real changes in the near future with many service providers placing greater emphasis on prevention.