How to talk to your kids about sexual abuse and how you can prevent it? This is a million-dollar question in every parent’s mind. It is stressful to plan a big safety talk about sexual abuse with your kids. Don’t freak out, the conversation about sexual abuse and sexual abuse awareness can be part of the safety conversation for your kids.
A child is sexually abused when they are forced or persuaded to take part in sexual activities without their concern. The sexual abuse doesn’t have to be physical contact and it can happen online too. In some cases, the child won’t understand that what’s happening to them is sexual abuse(R).
That is why, in this article, we’re working to break the silence around child sexual abuse and create a sexual abuse awareness.
How to Do You Define Child Sexual Abuse?
There are two different types of child sexual abuse(R). One is called contact abuse and the other one is non-contact abuse.
Contact abuse is well defined when it involves touching activities where an abuser makes physical contact with a child or kids, including penetration. It also includes:
- sexually touching any part of the body whether the child’s wearing clothes or not.
- Rape or penetration by putting an object or body part inside a child’s mouth, vagina or anus
- forcing or encouraging a child to take part in sexual activity without his/her concern.
- making a child take their clothes off and touch someone else’s genitals or masturbate.
Non-contact abuse involves non-touching activities, such as grooming, exploitation, persuading children to perform sexual acts over the internet and flashing. It includes:
- encouraging a child to watch or hear sexual acts or play
- not taking proper measures to prevent a child from being exposed to sexual activities by others
- meeting a child following sexual grooming with the intent of abusing them
- online abuse including making, viewing or distributing child abuse images
- allowing someone else to make, view or distribute child abuse images
- showing pornography to a child
- sexually exploiting a child for money, power or status.
Ways to talk to kids about sexual abuse:
Here are some of the simplest and easiest ways that will guide you to talk to your kids about sexual abuse. The key is to start the conversation when your kids are young enough.
“We can arm kids with the knowledge that might save them from being victimized”
1. Talk About Body Parts Early:
“You can teach your children about the correct names of their body parts and the model of respect for their bodily autonomy and boundaries from a very young age,” says Laura Reagan, a licensed clinical social worker in Maryland. Use the proper name of the body parts or actual words for the body parts(R) of your kids. It’s important to convey your children the message that their body is normal and answer as many as you can to children’s questions about their bodily functions and sex etc.
Face the challenges without shaming them for being curious. Make sure you do not force your children to give hugs or kisses or sit on anyone’s lap apart from parents. Teach the kids that they are the only ones who are allowed to touch their sexual body parts, except when a doctor or caregiver needs to examine those body parts for a specific reason related to health or hygiene.
2. Start Talking about Sexual Reproduction around 5 Years Old:
Mostly around 4 or 5 years of age, children become more curious about where babies come from. That period of time is perfect where you can talk about sex and sexual abuse in an accurate and simple way without having to get into details of it.
The information regarding sexual reproduction should be explained or conveyed as pre their gender. Adequate knowledge about sexual reproduction will help the kids to have sexual awareness and protect themselves from sexual abuse. For more tips this topic and what to tell kids at various ages(R) you can visit.
3. Create an environment of calmness, openness, and safety to ask a question:
Throughout the period of childhood and teen years, the parents should model a calm, support, safety and openness environment, rather than confrontational questioning environment. This will encourage your child and teens to feel a safe way to raise topics or issues for discussion over the course of time. Teach your children that they can come to you anytime about anything and they can ask you and you won’t get angry on them.
You can help your child by staying open and process things as they come up by using good listening skills and advising them back, such as repeating what your child tells you back and you can try to empathize with their perspective and helping your kids in problem-solving when issues come up or arise. Continuing to do this with this tips to talk to your kids about the sexual abuse will definitively help your children to feel safe in coming to you when they encounter any such issues or problems in their lives.
4. Protect your child from Pornography:
Though this quite seems obvious in the age of extremely easy for digital access in today’s world. The exposure to pornography is much of it highly explicit, violent and moreover of degrading occurring nowadays. While we cannot stop to older children from being exposed outside of the home, but we can ask parents of their friends about parameters around this phenomenon and the model of transparency in acknowledging.
But, in the case of younger ones, we will need to take care of and protect it. What gets the worse is that more and more often, the younger teens especially the young girls are sharing explicit “selfies” with their boyfriends,” says Stacie Rumenap, president of Stop Child Predators, a nonprofit group that combats the sexual exploitation of children nationwide. In some extreme cases, these same teens are being arrested for possession and distribution of child pornography.
So It’s quite important to warn the teens against sending such raunchy photos as jokes or as love notes. When a relationship disintegrates, those pictures can be sent maliciously elsewhere in the social platform and that results in ruining the kid’s life.
5. Do not shame children about masturbation, their bodies or sex:
This is another way to talk to kids about sexual abuse by teaching your kids that touching their own bodies is something that they can do only in private, not in public- Reagan says. Try to avoid sending the message that sex is something shameful or bad, rather than explain to them that sex is something adults do to express their love. While explaining, be clear that adults do not have sexual interactions with children or kids and that if any adult ever touches a child’s sexual body parts (R), then they should convey this to parent.
6. Share them the actual instances when their private part can be seen or touched:
It is an age-appropriate concept for a young child to understand that nobody including the parents and caregiver should see or touch their private parts. But also make a point that they should know that even in such situations, if someone is hurting them, they can say, “stop, it hurts” and tell their parent immediately if they face any such institution.
Some examples try to help them to understand what you’re talking about are when you’re giving them a bath or a doctor is seeing them. Ask them if that’s an example of keeping them clean, safe, or healthy as you’re doing it. Teach the kids that they are the only ones who are allowed to touch their sexual body parts.
7. Teach them that their Private Parts are Special:
When talking about sexual abuse topic to your kids, it’s important to not create a dirty feeling or thought around their private parts. Rather than that, parents should teach their child that their private parts are so special that they’re just for them and no one else should touch it, until unless someone is helping them keep their private parts clean, safe, or healthy. You can also ask your kids what it feels like when someone else is touching their private parts in order to keep it clean, safe, or healthy.
This will help them to understand the difference between that type of touching and someone touching them sexually. Teach the difference between good touch and bad touch. It’s also important to teach them that it’s inappropriate to touch by other people’s in their private part. And if someone does, they should tell you immediately. This is an important step to help children develop healthy sexuality before discussing sex itself with them and it leads to better sexual abuse awareness among kids.
8. Teach them their right to control their bodies:
This is one of the important aspects we often teach to your kids that adults have absolute authority over everything they do and kids have to do what they’re told. teach your child that their body is special and no one has the right to hurt their bodies. For children, it’s very empowering to have permission to say “no” to an adult if they’re uncomfortable with the wrong touch.
For example, when you’re at a social event, don’t make your child kiss or hug anyone. Instead let your child know they can give a kiss, hug, handshake, to people they see and it’s entirely up to them. And when an adult tries to make them give them a hug and they don’t want to, encourage the child to say “no”(R) and support their decision verbally.
9. Teach them what is Secret:
This is the most important aspect to talk to kids about sexual abuse to your kids as many abusers tell the child victims that what happened is a secret and do not tell to anyone, especially their parents. They try to play with kids by saying if you maintain so, they will give some prize, and kids just follow it. So it’s important to teach them early on their age that secrets are still kept secret if they will tell their mom or dad. Additionally, they should understand that anyone who wants them to keep secrets apart from their parents they shouldn’t be trusted and they should definitely tell their parents about such things.
10. Encourage them to trust their gut around their safety:
The parents shouldn’t instill a fear of people in around their child rather they should support their child in trusting their gut instinct. By trusting their intuition, children will be more empowered about making their own choices among who’s safe instead of relying primarily on what a parent has told or teach them. This is an important aspect of sexual abuse awareness because parent won’t always be there with them in every situation.
One way of aspect is to tell the child before any social events that if they ever feel uncomfortable with someone or even if nothing has happened, they can leave the place and tell their parent. Even if it looks rude to people they should know that they will not be punished for simply leaving the room. The kid’s sense of safety comes before the need to be polite. This is a healthy tip to be followed in creating a sexual abuse awareness by the parents.
Teach your child the language they need to talk about their bodies and information about boundaries that will help them to understand what is allowed and what is inappropriate for them. These ways will help them know when something isn’t right and give them the power to speak up and communicate with their parents. This tips will guide you in ways to deal with sexual abuse awareness with your kids.
