On Thursday March 2, I had the exciting opportunity to speak at the Washington School Counselors Association conference in Seattle, WA, on the topic of “Prevention of child sexual abuse – role of a school counselor”. This presentation was based on my second book which focuses on what we can do more and better to prevent child sexual abuse. I was pleasantly surprised to note that the presentation was very well received by the school counselors with a lot of follow-up comments and discussions.
In presentations of this nature I typically start with a general description of the subject matter involved and why it is important to talk about it in a school counselors conference. After that I present a summarized version of the story I wrote about in my book. At the end I take a significant amount of time to discuss what we can all learn from the story – specifically focusing on things that could have been done differently to achieve positive results in a more timely fashion.
The last part of my speech is really the most important part of the presentation – the focus is on how to develop a preventive mindset so we can act quickly to provide the utmost protection for our children. If we (i.e., child protective services, law enforcement, court systems, school staff, family members, etc) can all work together in a preventive mindset, we can certainly do much better in preventing child sexual abuse.