FREE CHAPTER from
How to Protect Kids from Child Molesters:
A New Approach for
Parents, Teachers, Clergy,
Recreational Directors and Anyone
Who Cares About Children
by Lauren Ayers, Ph.D.
with Ed Girtler, Sr. Investigator (RET), NYS Police
Introduction
The FBI predicts that one in five girls and one in ten boys will be sexually molested in their youth. Most of the
time the molester will be somebody quite well known to the child’s mother, and the youngster will say nothing
until perhaps the far away moment in adulthood, when she says, How could you not have known?
But it doesn’t have to be this way. There is nothing unavoidable about child victimization. The current epidemic
of sexual crimes against children results from passivity and defeatism and a belief that modern society cannot
avoid sexual attacks on kids.
In any society, traffic patterns reflect a consensus on what is an acceptable accident rate, and people drive
more or less carefully based on how much automotive damage they believe is reasonable. In the same way,
crime rates are a reflection of how much felonious damage people are willing to tolerate. Law enforcement is a
last resort that tries to rebalance the forces of crime and social stability. Because crimes against children are
largely invisible, they have been tolerated at relatively high rates, with damage to kids that may not become
apparent until adulthood.
It’s time that this changed, and change is not hard to come by in a nation that has proven itself capable of
spectacular feats. But it will take an act of will on the part of every adult who cares about kids, and a willingness
to change attitudes and learn new social behaviors, because the current ones favor sexual predators.
Where to start? We need to know more about parents and children, and why they act as they do. It isn’t
necessary to arrest and convict every sex offender to keep kids safe. Instead, we need to create a climate that
is not conducive to child victimization. We need to rearrange the setting and change the subtle balances in the
culture.
We can do this very quickly, in a matter of months, if we understand the reorganization that needs to happen.
We must begin by understanding children’s lives and how they have changed, because right now children deal
with the problem of child abuse on their own, largely without help from adults.
In part 1 we begin with a discussion of the vast cultural changes that have resulted from the epidemic of
sexual crimes against children, and then we look at the impact on parents of chronic fear and inadequacy in
protecting kids. In part 2, we explore how adults unwittingly enable sexual criminals, and how loving parents are
exploited. In part 3 we explore the behavioral changes adults need to make, and in part 4, we develop an
approach to child safety in our major institutions and in our everyday behavior.
Part 1
The Problem
CHAPTER ONE:
EMPTY STREETS
Not so long ago in America on any Saturday or summer afternoon, the streets were teeming with kids and cars
had to steer around clumps of youngsters at play. Children played made-up games, stickball or potsy, jump
rope or cat’s cradle; and sometimes when there was nothing to do, there was kicking the can or getting into
mischief. Kids often ended up outside because if they were in the house too long, they’d get noisy and scrappy,
and mothers would send them out and tell them they couldn’t come back in until dinnertime.
But if you drive through residential neighborhoods these days, it’s rare to see kids outside playing, and if you
do, there will probably be parents close by. Sometimes you see youngsters on bicycles, but not often. If you
went looking for the kids, you’d probably find them at home, watching television or going on the computer or
playing video games. For young children, there is no wandering around and trying to find somebody to play
with. Instead, parents arrange play dates, where children relate to each other with assigned toys while parents
stand by.
The kids who might have been playing in the streets in another era now are more likely to be in organized,
supervised play activity like sports, soccer, basketball, music lessons or dance lessons, to which parents
accompany them.
Kids have become less free and less safe in recent decades. Children’s play has become a pastime that is
orchestrated by adults, so that kids no longer generate their own entertainment and work out the associated
social complexities. Instead, adult ideas and adult organization structure their play, and then children are forced
into the patterns the adults have chosen. Attention deficit disorder was unknown back in the days when kids
were deciding what it was that needed to be paid attention to.
The idea that a child could plan and arrange his or her own activities and take off from the home to pursue
them, is unsettling to parents, who fear that a child may disappear or become the target of a child molester. In
the same vein, children’s own transportation, which included bicycles, tricycles, skates, skateboards, box carts
and any other form of movement kids could create, now are restricted so that kids can’t use them to explore
their environs. Kids are limited to home or local play areas unless parents drive them to other places.
Transportation abruptly becomes unrestricted when a youngster and his friends turn sixteen and get driver’s
licenses, because then they can roam freely and widely.
The transition to freedom is also complicated for families living in large cities, because by fifth grade, or age
ten or eleven, kids begin to explore their surroundings. Parents must deal with children who need to travel
using trains, buses, subways or taxicabs. Specialized urban schools chosen by parents to enhance their
youngsters’ education are rarely in the same neighborhood where kids live, and it is unwieldy for a mom to
travel on public transportation with a youngster. Suddenly, a child who has been protected and supervised
needs to manage the bus or the subway alone.
There are many ways that parents try to encircle their kids and protect them from harm, but there are no
guarantees that they will succeed. It was after all, in a large city that six-year-old Etan Patz disappeared in 1979
from his SoHo street while making the two-block trip to the bus stop for the first time. His mother had watched
him as he walked down the first block, and then she confidently went back upstairs to her apartment, never to
see her son again.
Sometimes the issues surrounding youthful freedom are even more complicated, as in the case of the
youngster who wants to use the elevator alone in his apartment building. Although the building is his home, a
youngster who is fifty stories away in a locked metal box is beyond a parent’s help.
There are also the optional, school-related events such as the drama production or athletic event that
requires off-hour transportation when the buses and trains will not be filled with school kids. These may seem
like simple, small permissions for an adult to grant, but they can be accompanied by the cold sweat of parental
fear.
In suburban and rural neighborhoods, walking to a friend’s house or playing in the woods can set off a
shudder of adult terror combined with the thought that this may be the last time a child is seen alive. It’s no
wonder that parents find excuses to drive kids places and discourage their youthful wanderings.
Kids love independence and their adventures come either with parental help and guidance or in secret. If
children are closely protected until adolescence, their teen behavior can become much too daring for a parent’
s comfort. In past times, adults could be reassured by the memory of their own childhood mischief and its
harmless results. But federal funding requirements created in the 1970s produced data that ended the illusion
of child safety in the United States.
The passage of the Mondale Act in 1974 required states to report suspected physical and sexual abuse of
children in order for them to receive federal funds. As a result, there was an estimated 2000 percent increase
in reports of sexual abuse, which seemed to indicate a huge, invisible threat to the safety of children. The
resulting increase in parental fear as these statistics became public knowledge produced little societal change,
but it became common for parents to caution kids to stay away from strangers and suspicious people. Parental
concern and vigilance were reflected in these warnings to kids, which became the primary form of protection
against abduction and abuse.
This approach to child protection has its drawbacks. In cautioning their youngsters, parents can inadvertently
convey the message that a child can never make safe enough decisions to satisfy a parent. The pivotal issue
here is likely to be parental anxiety and not child adequacy; for no matter how careful a child may be, a parent
never stops worrying. Children who feel they can’t depend on their own judgment look to other children or
adults to decide what is safe or dangerous. In a cruel irony, kids who grow up depending solely on their parents
for safety may become easy targets for sexual predators who seduce by encouraging a child’s dependency.
Public awareness that there are a large number of registered sex offenders in the United States, and many
more who are unregistered or undetected, creates a siege mentality and forces children to spend much of their
free time at home. The news stories of children grabbed off the street, sexually assaulted, and then murdered
create a constant underlying sense of horror that one’s own child could very easily be the subject of the next
headline.
As a result of increased parental vigilance, children become more passive, more easily directed by adults and
less able to control their attention. They also become more isolated from other kids, which interferes with the
development of social skills.
The Way Kids Live
Most parents carefully consider neighborhood safety in choosing a home, and many urban neighborhoods
can seem too perilous for kids. Families with children are leaving American cities. Places like Seattle, San
Francisco, Boston, Pittsburgh, and Miami now have a different character because of the declining population of
youngsters. This is not just a melancholic observation, for the quality of life changes when children are not a
factor in urban planning. Schools, parks, and recreational activities all become somehow less necessary.
There are many reasons why parents see less promise in city life for their families, and financial, occupational,
and educational issues are all significant, but fear of criminals is a major parental concern. A home in a good
school district with parks and playgrounds may seem like a safe haven but a youngster will still probably spend
most of his time indoors. Parents are well aware that indoor time with electronic devices is not wholesome as a
steady diet, but it offers a truce between a child’s need for adventure and a parent’s fears for his safety.
What is a child’s indoor life like? The siege of childhood by sexual predators causes changes in family life. If a
family has great financial resources, the home may be enlarged into a family compound with children’s activities
contained in a fenced backyard park. This may extend to the family vehicle, which becomes a rolling residence,
a self-contained child maintenance facility that reduces a youngster’s need to interact with the outside world.
Adults become very central in a child’s life under these circumstances because they plan, direct, and arrange
the schedule. Parents often are deprived of their own free time as a result of their heavy involvement with kids,
and so they can become psychologically enmeshed in their children’s development, which limits the growth of a
child’s separate personality.
Mom and child spend a great deal of time together, and mom becomes like a camp counselor, always present
and directing activities so that it can be hard to determine where mom stops and a child begins. If mom and
child “love” going to the French restaurant for example, it may not be clear whose needs are being served by
the outing. The need to separate in adolescence may lead a young teenager to throw off a mother’s
involvement with too much energy when separate personalities have not been supported early on. Adolescent
defiance can represent a youngster’s fight to control his life, and a struggle with a teen’s own self doubt.
By taking charge of all safety decisions, parents can limit the growth of a youngster’s judgment because
decision-making always involves risk taking. Trial and error, along with guidance and teaching, can steadily
expand a youngster’s capability, but this may not happen if a parent is too frightened of the dangers in a
youngster’s surroundings.
Excessive involvement in a child’s life can have consequences for the adults as well. If fear stops a parent
from hiring babysitters, adult social skills may atrophy and social agility with adults can diminish. This may affect
more than social functioning, because a marriage may become unbalanced if both parents don’t share the
same anxiety about children’s safety.
For children, the social skills that develop from free-ranging play are stunted when parents are excessively
involved in monitoring their lives. Electronic play opportunities may become a substitute; but these don’t supply
human feedback, and they may interfere with the types of learning skills required for school achievement.
Reading problems or reading aversion, attentional difficulties and memory disorders can result from heavy
computer or television involvement. It doesn’t much matter what is presented, because the act of sitting
passively in front of a computer or television monitor is not the profile of an active and successful learner.
Inactivity leads to growth failure in learning mechanisms as children become conditioned to passive
responses.
Success in school is more difficult to achieve when kids have been “trained” to anticipate entertainment and
simplicity. Adults sometimes interpret this behavior to mean that kids are intellectually limited, and the
proliferation of recognized handicapping conditions serves this view.
Parental complaints at open school night rarely include demands that children be pushed to learn; instead,
teachers are often asked to lighten the homework load. Perhaps this is an indication that parents are
overburdened with the demands of excessive time spent safeguarding their children. It may also result from
children who have come to see learning as a receptive process, rather than as the result of their own energetic
exploratory behavior.
As kids become more limited in their ability to tackle life, more parental time is required to fill the gap between
their needs and their effort. But adults have responsibilities outside of parenting, and these require attention as
well. In addition, most mothers and fathers work outside the home, which means that all of the home chores get
squeezed into less time.
Parents are often ambivalent about leaving kids with babysitters or in child care services. In earlier times when
family members lived nearby it was easier to leave a child with grandparents, but living patterns have changed
the availability of relatives. Using babysitters raises worries about child safety and leads parents to curtail their
activities away from their children.
Increasingly, American parents bring their kids with them to establishments intended for adults. Vacations and
nights out often include youngsters, and mom and dad then have little time alone with each other. There is no
longer a clear-cut delineation between child and adult entertainment because children’s play facilities are often
made parent friendly, and adult activities develop “with children” extensions. Parents bring the kids to the wine-
tasting reception at the vineyard, to the estate-planning seminar, and to their friends’ dinner parties.
How does this affect the structure of adult lives? It limits parental time for health, recreation, and social needs
when children are small because there is often no respite for parents. It also increases the stress of the
adolescent transition to adulthood because then parents lack the separate adult life that balances a departing
youngster. It also dilutes the intellectual complexity of adult entertainment because the kids won’t understand if
a play or musical presentation is too complicated.
A second major change that results from the “house arrest” of kids is an increase in children’s weight, with the
associated problem of diabetes. Although factors such as the availability of high-calorie, high-fat fast food have
a great impact on nutritional habits, the restriction on children’s physical activity outside the home is a major
obstacle to maintaining healthy weight.
A child’s “on-premises” restriction, whether by parental edict or by childish habits and fears, makes the
refrigerator everlastingly available so that snacking is continuous, often as an accompaniment to watching TV.
Both television and food offset the loneliness that goes with being home, often alone. But being in the house
with nobody to talk to makes the opportunities on the Internet all the more enticing. It is so easy to sign on,
locate a chat room, and find companionship.
The organizations that formerly drew kids out of the home for healthy activities, including churches,
synagogues, and other religious institutions, may seem less secure because some religious leaders have
committed sexual crimes. For parents who want to offer their children spiritual education and guidance through
organized religious activities, this stirs concern. Although in the past, houses of worship were seen as
strongholds that bolstered parental values, reports of sexual crimes raise doubts about the trustworthiness of
religious authorities. If predators may be lurking among the clergy or congregants, how can parents believe that
churches and temples are safe places for kids?
Summer camps and other recreational organizations have suffered less from fears of child abuse, perhaps
because the incidence of reported crimes against children seems lower in these settings. However, liability still
exists there, and the fear of such reports is ever present. Schools, in contrast, have fared better, perhaps
because educational activities are highly structured and there is less opportunity for solitary involvement with
children. It is in the extracurricular and off-hours activities that the risk increases, as well as when extra adults
are brought into scheduled programs as helpers.
Kids as Crime Targets
For a child growing up in the twenty-first century, cultural messages continually reinforce the premise that
children are fragile and need to stay close to home to be safe. Potentially helpless victims who must look to
adults to protect them, kids are also told that adults cannot guarantee their safety, and sometimes parents
seem to doubt that they have the moral authority to do so. Youngsters hear about sexual crimes from the media
and over the Internet, so they are aware that there are real dangers. Does it inhibit their sense of adventure or
their wish to explore and master the world?
Children usually believe their parents, at least until adolescence; and when parents tell them there are real
threats out there, kids take it seriously. But dealing with criminals is an area where kids have little experience,
and adults’ suggestions often aren’t useful, so a youngster has to come up with his own ideas. The standard
Don’t talk to strangers, Don’t get into a car, doesn’t begin to address the complexity of sexual predator
behavior. When the man in a wheelchair in the church restroom asks a boy to help him unzip his pants, it’s not
likely that a boy will identify this as a criminal overture.
If a child has missed the message that he is a crime target, then the names of laws in the news will certainly
serve as a reminder. The Jacob Wetterling Crimes Against Children Act, named after a boy who disappeared
after renting a video for his babysitting evening; or the Polly Klaus Act, named for an abducted and murdered
twelve year old; or Megan’s Law, passed to protect children from neighborhood sex offenders like the one that
abducted, molested, and murdered seven-year-old Megan Kanka, all underscore kids’ vulnerability.
Crime has become a national obsession as well as a form of entertainment, as evidenced by the phenomenal
success of Law and Order and all of its spin-offs. The popularity of one of its derivatives, Law & Order, Special
Victims Unit, may be the result of its satisfying if not always happy endings to crimes against the vulnerable,
including kids. This is in marked contrast to the many warnings and fatalistic alerts to parents about the danger
of child molesters.
As parents hunker down, trying to keep kids safe, it is tempting to dismiss their feelings as overreaction, but
that is not the case. The danger is real and the consequences lifelong, both of crime and of the vigilance it
provokes. Parental fears that their kids are in danger are supported by crime statistics.
Sexual crimes are primarily targeted against the young in the United States, with girls six times as likely to be
victims as boys. According to the Justice Department, 67 percent of sexual attacks are against youngsters
under eighteen. Even worse, more than a third of rape victims are little kids, with 34 percent of rape victims
younger than twelve.
These are not occasional, unusual crimes; instead, they are the result of criminal careers that involve many
victims. Those who prey on children as targets often have a history of many crimes. In one survey, sexual
offenders who targeted girls had an average of 52 victims each, while men who assaulted boys had an average
of 150 victims. The constant concern for safety that causes parents to restrict their kids’ lives is well founded,
but it has not led to success in keeping kids safe.
Parental Confusion
American parents are among the most active in the world in their tireless efforts to find new ways to raise
healthy, happy human beings. An entire parenting industry has emerged in the United States, and it is devoted
to enhancing child development. Over the decades, the focus of concern and the level of adequacy that
parents feel have changed.
Parental worries of the past may seem silly by today’s standards. In the last part of the 1800s, correct posture
was a particular focus of childrearing, so much so that adolescents were photographed in the nude to
determine whether parents were giving them enough guidance on this subject. During World War II, the effects
of germs and feeding schedules became a focus of parental concern. Guests were cautioned not to pick up the
baby, and meals were delivered by the clock.
Concerns about youngsters’ hardiness have been replaced by worries about their vulnerability to crime.
Children’s literature can be an index of the perceived sturdiness of kids: although the girl detective Nancy Drew
was originally fearless, brave and daring, in more recent versions of the mystery series, she has become a
helpless and largely decorative female.
The perceived decline of children’s sturdiness has led to a greater need for parental protection. This has
occurred across most areas of children’s development, and has often led to good results. The rise of driver
education programs, for example, has produced skilled and responsible young drivers. In the area of sexual
victimization, this has not worked as well.
In part, this is because parents have erroneous or incomplete information about criminal risk to kids and so
they can offer little practical help. Warnings about taking candy from strangers rarely equip children for the
more complex approaches of sexual predators. It would be hard to imagine a parent telling her elementary
school-age child:
· Grandpa is too eager to get you naked, so he can’t baby-sit for you.
· Your stepbrother likes pornography, so I don’t want him taking pictures of you.
· That priest who loves to take the boys out for fast food is off limits to you.
Instead of dealing with risks to children from familiar people, parents focus on the stranger, the person
unknown to child or parent. Media headlines describing child abduction and murder fuel the belief that the
major threat to kids is from strangers.
In trying to deal with the psychological impact of these reports, parents are quickly defeated by the enormity of
the problem. They search for an understanding of these horrible crimes, but often they are left with only the
ghastly details and the permanent imprint of news stories.
Information about sexual crimes against children is traumatizing, and most of the emergency services have
planned responses for those exposed to this kind of information. But parents have no such support, and crime
description details eat away at their sense of well-being and competence. There are no reliable ways for
parents to insure their kids’ safety in the current climate other than watching over them at all times.
In the drama of the abducted child, what is obscured is the fact that a crime like this is extremely rare—about
one in three million children are victimized in this way. When parents concentrate on abduction as the major
threat to kids, they overlook the real danger of their child being molested by someone they know.
We have sophisticated law enforcement responses in place to deal with child abduction or child rape, but we
have no such procedures for crimes within the family and acquaintance network. What’s worse, children usually
don’t report these crimes. In that rare case where a child does disclose improper behavior by grandpa or the
stepbrother, a parent has no way of evaluating the information or planning an adequate response. This may
explain the appeal of television shows like The Jerry Springer Show or The Ricki Lake Show where problems
like this are discussed, because the programs serve as a source of information that allows parents to think
about how to deal with this eventuality.
Without a good response plan, parents resort to other ways of dealing with indications of child sexual
exploitation. Sometimes a parent may refuse to see or hear sign that a youngster is being molested. The
youngster who doesn’t like his coach, hates religious instruction, always has to go back for extra music lessons
or who tells a parent that an adult is weird may be disclosing sexual exploitation in the hope that he can relieve
himself of guilt and avoid further exposure. But parents who are not in the habit of listening to a child will miss
the message if it causes them too much confusion.
When kids do disclose, it’s rarely in a manner that parents would expect, and if they spoke straightforwardly,
parents would probably be at a loss for a response:
· Mom, the guy you married wants to show me porno flicks when you’re out.
· Why does my cousin keep talking about how now I’m wearing a bra?
· Mom, your brother is always trying to rub spots off my clothes on my rear or chest.
What is a parent’s best response to these comments? Calling the police? Getting a divorce? Accusing the
person of child molesting? Parents, particularly mothers, risk an embarrassing rift in a relationship if they act,
and so often they advise the child to ”stay away from” the questionable person. Fear of wrongly accusing
someone of a dastardly act and the defensive reactions it will stir are powerful deterrents in families where
these kinds of problems surface. A parent may feel sharply conflicted in her loyalties and protective of both the
child and the other person. Avoidance and denial become the seemingly best option so that a parent takes no
action after a child mentions sexual overtures by an adult.
Sometimes there is a complete refusal to accept a child’s report of sexual abuse, and a parent says, You’re
making that up. Denial as a defense mechanism serves to protect the psyche against those threats for which
there is no protection, and here it serves its purpose: the parental psyche is protected, but the child is not. This
response recycles sexual predators who can learn what causes a child to tell and then change their tactics. The
predator, who has escaped exposure one more time, can now refine his lures. Instead of showing porno flicks
to a verbally skilled child, he may show cartoon porno flicks to a much younger child who will not be able to
identify them as such to an adult, describing them only as “Beauty and the Beast” or “Cinderella.”
The brother who rubs spots off clothes may switch to targeting children outside the family, finding them in
public places rather than in relatives’ homes. The cousin who comments on underwear may become vocal in
criticizing the “repressive thinking” of a girl who isn’t comfortable with his comments, diverting attention from his
behavior.
If the consequences of adult confusion are problematic to parents, the costs to children are staggering.
Sexual crimes against kids involve massive victimization because for each predator, there are many children
who are hurt. The National Institute of Mental Health estimates for example, that 453 convicted sexual predators
assaulted more than 67,000 children in their careers. If the consequences for children as a group are terrible,
the effects on individual victims are horrific. Molested kids are three times as likely to become substance
abusers, become teen parents, and suffer depression and suicidal risk as they mature.
The consequences for a young spirit, a child growing and learning about the world, are far worse. For an
individual youngster, abuse brings the awareness that one has been exploited, shamed, and conned for the
sinister purposes of another and the anguish that one may have been a cooperative victim. The self-
righteousness of the preferential pedophile leads him to tell a child, This is good for you; this is right, but a child
senses something quite different. And when he has been used up and discarded, or when he has passed the
age the molester prefers, then there is a profound loss of the sense of being special.
In their fear of major crimes, sometimes parents try to appease the gods of child safety by sacrificing on
smaller points. The subconscious reasoning is, Perhaps if I accept that my child may be fondled, which doesn’t
really hurt him, I‘ll be spared the horror of an abduction and murder. Or perhaps if I put the community welfare
above that of my own family, my children will find favor in the eyes of fate and remain unharmed by the dark
forces that linger at the edge of their lives. Obviously, this thinking is not voiced aloud, but it serves as a kind of
magic incantation to protect against the unthinkable.
The wider culture doesn’t offer parents much more to safeguard their kids. In fact, the attempts at protection
are ghastly, useless, or dangerous. Grimmest of all is the proliferation of child identification kits, which are
actually child corpse identification kits that are meant to identify the remains of children who have been
abducted and murdered. Surely we can do better than to offer this to our young families as a way to protect
their offspring.
The approach of expecting and teaching children to report sexual crimes has had little success because
children generally don’t report. In those cases where they do, it is usually far later, when they have become
adults. Nonetheless, we keep repeating to children that they should tell parents if anybody “bothers” them.
The result is that there is a shift in responsibility for child protection to the child because after all, if a
youngster doesn’t tell, what can you do? We expect younger and younger kids to report sex crimes when most
of them have trouble relating anything factual. We give delinquents juvenile offender status under age sixteen
because we recognize that they cannot be fully responsible for their actions, and their logic, reasoning and
memory are not good; yet we expect children far younger to serve as witnesses to sexual crimes by reporting
them. One reason that kids don’t tell is because they can’t, because they are cognitively far too undeveloped to
manage such a complex task as identifying and reporting a legal infraction.
Sexual predators force children to relate to them on a peer level, but children are immature beings who can’t
remain integrated in trying to handle something as complex as human sexuality. The legal process requires the
same kind of pseudo-adult performance when it expects kids to serve as accurate witnesses. The fact that
children can occasionally do so is useful, but it cannot be the cornerstone for exposure of criminal activity.
When children are victims of sexual crimes, they frequently cannot identify them as such because sexual
predators disguise the nature of their behavior. We have programs to prepare children for experiences like
hospitalization, so that they can identify and label their feelings and understand what is required of them, but
we have no such programs to prepare children to deal with crime victimization, although child abuse prevention
programs hold kids responsible for their own safety.
Often, parents ease their fears by assuming that kids are taught to be safe in school by child safety programs.
But these programs raise serious questions about what works, and the continuing rates of sexual offenses
against children suggest that they are far from protective.
But let’s imagine a very different world, one in which children are truly safe. They walk to school by
themselves, they take buses and subways, and they play outside and investigate the neighborhoods and cities
where they live. They are a vibrant part of religious institutions where they explore their place and purpose in
the universe, and they have lots of adventures at camp and other recreational programs. In school, they begin
to close the academic gap with the rest of the world so that their learning and achievement soar. They are
brave and smart; they understand the risks in their lives, and parents are their best allies in staying safe. Crime
statistics drop steadily, and sexual offenses against children become a relic of the dark past.
The kids sleep soundly, and it is the child molesters and pedophiles who have the nightmares. The criminals
are forever looking over their shoulders in fear of who may be after them. And there are no more laws named
for murdered children.
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How to Protect Kids from Child Molesters:
A New Approach for
Parents, Teachers, Clergy,
Recreational Directors and Anyone
Who Cares About Children
by Lauren Ayers, Ph.D.
with Ed Girtler, Sr. Investigator (RET), NYS Police
Introduction
The FBI predicts that one in five girls and one in ten boys will be sexually molested in their youth. Most of the
time the molester will be somebody quite well known to the child’s mother, and the youngster will say nothing
until perhaps the far away moment in adulthood, when she says, How could you not have known?
But it doesn’t have to be this way. There is nothing unavoidable about child victimization. The current epidemic
of sexual crimes against children results from passivity and defeatism and a belief that modern society cannot
avoid sexual attacks on kids.
In any society, traffic patterns reflect a consensus on what is an acceptable accident rate, and people drive
more or less carefully based on how much automotive damage they believe is reasonable. In the same way,
crime rates are a reflection of how much felonious damage people are willing to tolerate. Law enforcement is a
last resort that tries to rebalance the forces of crime and social stability. Because crimes against children are
largely invisible, they have been tolerated at relatively high rates, with damage to kids that may not become
apparent until adulthood.
It’s time that this changed, and change is not hard to come by in a nation that has proven itself capable of
spectacular feats. But it will take an act of will on the part of every adult who cares about kids, and a willingness
to change attitudes and learn new social behaviors, because the current ones favor sexual predators.
Where to start? We need to know more about parents and children, and why they act as they do. It isn’t
necessary to arrest and convict every sex offender to keep kids safe. Instead, we need to create a climate that
is not conducive to child victimization. We need to rearrange the setting and change the subtle balances in the
culture.
We can do this very quickly, in a matter of months, if we understand the reorganization that needs to happen.
We must begin by understanding children’s lives and how they have changed, because right now children deal
with the problem of child abuse on their own, largely without help from adults.
In part 1 we begin with a discussion of the vast cultural changes that have resulted from the epidemic of
sexual crimes against children, and then we look at the impact on parents of chronic fear and inadequacy in
protecting kids. In part 2, we explore how adults unwittingly enable sexual criminals, and how loving parents are
exploited. In part 3 we explore the behavioral changes adults need to make, and in part 4, we develop an
approach to child safety in our major institutions and in our everyday behavior.
Part 1
The Problem
CHAPTER ONE:
EMPTY STREETS
Not so long ago in America on any Saturday or summer afternoon, the streets were teeming with kids and cars
had to steer around clumps of youngsters at play. Children played made-up games, stickball or potsy, jump
rope or cat’s cradle; and sometimes when there was nothing to do, there was kicking the can or getting into
mischief. Kids often ended up outside because if they were in the house too long, they’d get noisy and scrappy,
and mothers would send them out and tell them they couldn’t come back in until dinnertime.
But if you drive through residential neighborhoods these days, it’s rare to see kids outside playing, and if you
do, there will probably be parents close by. Sometimes you see youngsters on bicycles, but not often. If you
went looking for the kids, you’d probably find them at home, watching television or going on the computer or
playing video games. For young children, there is no wandering around and trying to find somebody to play
with. Instead, parents arrange play dates, where children relate to each other with assigned toys while parents
stand by.
The kids who might have been playing in the streets in another era now are more likely to be in organized,
supervised play activity like sports, soccer, basketball, music lessons or dance lessons, to which parents
accompany them.
Kids have become less free and less safe in recent decades. Children’s play has become a pastime that is
orchestrated by adults, so that kids no longer generate their own entertainment and work out the associated
social complexities. Instead, adult ideas and adult organization structure their play, and then children are forced
into the patterns the adults have chosen. Attention deficit disorder was unknown back in the days when kids
were deciding what it was that needed to be paid attention to.
The idea that a child could plan and arrange his or her own activities and take off from the home to pursue
them, is unsettling to parents, who fear that a child may disappear or become the target of a child molester. In
the same vein, children’s own transportation, which included bicycles, tricycles, skates, skateboards, box carts
and any other form of movement kids could create, now are restricted so that kids can’t use them to explore
their environs. Kids are limited to home or local play areas unless parents drive them to other places.
Transportation abruptly becomes unrestricted when a youngster and his friends turn sixteen and get driver’s
licenses, because then they can roam freely and widely.
The transition to freedom is also complicated for families living in large cities, because by fifth grade, or age
ten or eleven, kids begin to explore their surroundings. Parents must deal with children who need to travel
using trains, buses, subways or taxicabs. Specialized urban schools chosen by parents to enhance their
youngsters’ education are rarely in the same neighborhood where kids live, and it is unwieldy for a mom to
travel on public transportation with a youngster. Suddenly, a child who has been protected and supervised
needs to manage the bus or the subway alone.
There are many ways that parents try to encircle their kids and protect them from harm, but there are no
guarantees that they will succeed. It was after all, in a large city that six-year-old Etan Patz disappeared in 1979
from his SoHo street while making the two-block trip to the bus stop for the first time. His mother had watched
him as he walked down the first block, and then she confidently went back upstairs to her apartment, never to
see her son again.
Sometimes the issues surrounding youthful freedom are even more complicated, as in the case of the
youngster who wants to use the elevator alone in his apartment building. Although the building is his home, a
youngster who is fifty stories away in a locked metal box is beyond a parent’s help.
There are also the optional, school-related events such as the drama production or athletic event that
requires off-hour transportation when the buses and trains will not be filled with school kids. These may seem
like simple, small permissions for an adult to grant, but they can be accompanied by the cold sweat of parental
fear.
In suburban and rural neighborhoods, walking to a friend’s house or playing in the woods can set off a
shudder of adult terror combined with the thought that this may be the last time a child is seen alive. It’s no
wonder that parents find excuses to drive kids places and discourage their youthful wanderings.
Kids love independence and their adventures come either with parental help and guidance or in secret. If
children are closely protected until adolescence, their teen behavior can become much too daring for a parent’
s comfort. In past times, adults could be reassured by the memory of their own childhood mischief and its
harmless results. But federal funding requirements created in the 1970s produced data that ended the illusion
of child safety in the United States.
The passage of the Mondale Act in 1974 required states to report suspected physical and sexual abuse of
children in order for them to receive federal funds. As a result, there was an estimated 2000 percent increase
in reports of sexual abuse, which seemed to indicate a huge, invisible threat to the safety of children. The
resulting increase in parental fear as these statistics became public knowledge produced little societal change,
but it became common for parents to caution kids to stay away from strangers and suspicious people. Parental
concern and vigilance were reflected in these warnings to kids, which became the primary form of protection
against abduction and abuse.
This approach to child protection has its drawbacks. In cautioning their youngsters, parents can inadvertently
convey the message that a child can never make safe enough decisions to satisfy a parent. The pivotal issue
here is likely to be parental anxiety and not child adequacy; for no matter how careful a child may be, a parent
never stops worrying. Children who feel they can’t depend on their own judgment look to other children or
adults to decide what is safe or dangerous. In a cruel irony, kids who grow up depending solely on their parents
for safety may become easy targets for sexual predators who seduce by encouraging a child’s dependency.
Public awareness that there are a large number of registered sex offenders in the United States, and many
more who are unregistered or undetected, creates a siege mentality and forces children to spend much of their
free time at home. The news stories of children grabbed off the street, sexually assaulted, and then murdered
create a constant underlying sense of horror that one’s own child could very easily be the subject of the next
headline.
As a result of increased parental vigilance, children become more passive, more easily directed by adults and
less able to control their attention. They also become more isolated from other kids, which interferes with the
development of social skills.
The Way Kids Live
Most parents carefully consider neighborhood safety in choosing a home, and many urban neighborhoods
can seem too perilous for kids. Families with children are leaving American cities. Places like Seattle, San
Francisco, Boston, Pittsburgh, and Miami now have a different character because of the declining population of
youngsters. This is not just a melancholic observation, for the quality of life changes when children are not a
factor in urban planning. Schools, parks, and recreational activities all become somehow less necessary.
There are many reasons why parents see less promise in city life for their families, and financial, occupational,
and educational issues are all significant, but fear of criminals is a major parental concern. A home in a good
school district with parks and playgrounds may seem like a safe haven but a youngster will still probably spend
most of his time indoors. Parents are well aware that indoor time with electronic devices is not wholesome as a
steady diet, but it offers a truce between a child’s need for adventure and a parent’s fears for his safety.
What is a child’s indoor life like? The siege of childhood by sexual predators causes changes in family life. If a
family has great financial resources, the home may be enlarged into a family compound with children’s activities
contained in a fenced backyard park. This may extend to the family vehicle, which becomes a rolling residence,
a self-contained child maintenance facility that reduces a youngster’s need to interact with the outside world.
Adults become very central in a child’s life under these circumstances because they plan, direct, and arrange
the schedule. Parents often are deprived of their own free time as a result of their heavy involvement with kids,
and so they can become psychologically enmeshed in their children’s development, which limits the growth of a
child’s separate personality.
Mom and child spend a great deal of time together, and mom becomes like a camp counselor, always present
and directing activities so that it can be hard to determine where mom stops and a child begins. If mom and
child “love” going to the French restaurant for example, it may not be clear whose needs are being served by
the outing. The need to separate in adolescence may lead a young teenager to throw off a mother’s
involvement with too much energy when separate personalities have not been supported early on. Adolescent
defiance can represent a youngster’s fight to control his life, and a struggle with a teen’s own self doubt.
By taking charge of all safety decisions, parents can limit the growth of a youngster’s judgment because
decision-making always involves risk taking. Trial and error, along with guidance and teaching, can steadily
expand a youngster’s capability, but this may not happen if a parent is too frightened of the dangers in a
youngster’s surroundings.
Excessive involvement in a child’s life can have consequences for the adults as well. If fear stops a parent
from hiring babysitters, adult social skills may atrophy and social agility with adults can diminish. This may affect
more than social functioning, because a marriage may become unbalanced if both parents don’t share the
same anxiety about children’s safety.
For children, the social skills that develop from free-ranging play are stunted when parents are excessively
involved in monitoring their lives. Electronic play opportunities may become a substitute; but these don’t supply
human feedback, and they may interfere with the types of learning skills required for school achievement.
Reading problems or reading aversion, attentional difficulties and memory disorders can result from heavy
computer or television involvement. It doesn’t much matter what is presented, because the act of sitting
passively in front of a computer or television monitor is not the profile of an active and successful learner.
Inactivity leads to growth failure in learning mechanisms as children become conditioned to passive
responses.
Success in school is more difficult to achieve when kids have been “trained” to anticipate entertainment and
simplicity. Adults sometimes interpret this behavior to mean that kids are intellectually limited, and the
proliferation of recognized handicapping conditions serves this view.
Parental complaints at open school night rarely include demands that children be pushed to learn; instead,
teachers are often asked to lighten the homework load. Perhaps this is an indication that parents are
overburdened with the demands of excessive time spent safeguarding their children. It may also result from
children who have come to see learning as a receptive process, rather than as the result of their own energetic
exploratory behavior.
As kids become more limited in their ability to tackle life, more parental time is required to fill the gap between
their needs and their effort. But adults have responsibilities outside of parenting, and these require attention as
well. In addition, most mothers and fathers work outside the home, which means that all of the home chores get
squeezed into less time.
Parents are often ambivalent about leaving kids with babysitters or in child care services. In earlier times when
family members lived nearby it was easier to leave a child with grandparents, but living patterns have changed
the availability of relatives. Using babysitters raises worries about child safety and leads parents to curtail their
activities away from their children.
Increasingly, American parents bring their kids with them to establishments intended for adults. Vacations and
nights out often include youngsters, and mom and dad then have little time alone with each other. There is no
longer a clear-cut delineation between child and adult entertainment because children’s play facilities are often
made parent friendly, and adult activities develop “with children” extensions. Parents bring the kids to the wine-
tasting reception at the vineyard, to the estate-planning seminar, and to their friends’ dinner parties.
How does this affect the structure of adult lives? It limits parental time for health, recreation, and social needs
when children are small because there is often no respite for parents. It also increases the stress of the
adolescent transition to adulthood because then parents lack the separate adult life that balances a departing
youngster. It also dilutes the intellectual complexity of adult entertainment because the kids won’t understand if
a play or musical presentation is too complicated.
A second major change that results from the “house arrest” of kids is an increase in children’s weight, with the
associated problem of diabetes. Although factors such as the availability of high-calorie, high-fat fast food have
a great impact on nutritional habits, the restriction on children’s physical activity outside the home is a major
obstacle to maintaining healthy weight.
A child’s “on-premises” restriction, whether by parental edict or by childish habits and fears, makes the
refrigerator everlastingly available so that snacking is continuous, often as an accompaniment to watching TV.
Both television and food offset the loneliness that goes with being home, often alone. But being in the house
with nobody to talk to makes the opportunities on the Internet all the more enticing. It is so easy to sign on,
locate a chat room, and find companionship.
The organizations that formerly drew kids out of the home for healthy activities, including churches,
synagogues, and other religious institutions, may seem less secure because some religious leaders have
committed sexual crimes. For parents who want to offer their children spiritual education and guidance through
organized religious activities, this stirs concern. Although in the past, houses of worship were seen as
strongholds that bolstered parental values, reports of sexual crimes raise doubts about the trustworthiness of
religious authorities. If predators may be lurking among the clergy or congregants, how can parents believe that
churches and temples are safe places for kids?
Summer camps and other recreational organizations have suffered less from fears of child abuse, perhaps
because the incidence of reported crimes against children seems lower in these settings. However, liability still
exists there, and the fear of such reports is ever present. Schools, in contrast, have fared better, perhaps
because educational activities are highly structured and there is less opportunity for solitary involvement with
children. It is in the extracurricular and off-hours activities that the risk increases, as well as when extra adults
are brought into scheduled programs as helpers.
Kids as Crime Targets
For a child growing up in the twenty-first century, cultural messages continually reinforce the premise that
children are fragile and need to stay close to home to be safe. Potentially helpless victims who must look to
adults to protect them, kids are also told that adults cannot guarantee their safety, and sometimes parents
seem to doubt that they have the moral authority to do so. Youngsters hear about sexual crimes from the media
and over the Internet, so they are aware that there are real dangers. Does it inhibit their sense of adventure or
their wish to explore and master the world?
Children usually believe their parents, at least until adolescence; and when parents tell them there are real
threats out there, kids take it seriously. But dealing with criminals is an area where kids have little experience,
and adults’ suggestions often aren’t useful, so a youngster has to come up with his own ideas. The standard
Don’t talk to strangers, Don’t get into a car, doesn’t begin to address the complexity of sexual predator
behavior. When the man in a wheelchair in the church restroom asks a boy to help him unzip his pants, it’s not
likely that a boy will identify this as a criminal overture.
If a child has missed the message that he is a crime target, then the names of laws in the news will certainly
serve as a reminder. The Jacob Wetterling Crimes Against Children Act, named after a boy who disappeared
after renting a video for his babysitting evening; or the Polly Klaus Act, named for an abducted and murdered
twelve year old; or Megan’s Law, passed to protect children from neighborhood sex offenders like the one that
abducted, molested, and murdered seven-year-old Megan Kanka, all underscore kids’ vulnerability.
Crime has become a national obsession as well as a form of entertainment, as evidenced by the phenomenal
success of Law and Order and all of its spin-offs. The popularity of one of its derivatives, Law & Order, Special
Victims Unit, may be the result of its satisfying if not always happy endings to crimes against the vulnerable,
including kids. This is in marked contrast to the many warnings and fatalistic alerts to parents about the danger
of child molesters.
As parents hunker down, trying to keep kids safe, it is tempting to dismiss their feelings as overreaction, but
that is not the case. The danger is real and the consequences lifelong, both of crime and of the vigilance it
provokes. Parental fears that their kids are in danger are supported by crime statistics.
Sexual crimes are primarily targeted against the young in the United States, with girls six times as likely to be
victims as boys. According to the Justice Department, 67 percent of sexual attacks are against youngsters
under eighteen. Even worse, more than a third of rape victims are little kids, with 34 percent of rape victims
younger than twelve.
These are not occasional, unusual crimes; instead, they are the result of criminal careers that involve many
victims. Those who prey on children as targets often have a history of many crimes. In one survey, sexual
offenders who targeted girls had an average of 52 victims each, while men who assaulted boys had an average
of 150 victims. The constant concern for safety that causes parents to restrict their kids’ lives is well founded,
but it has not led to success in keeping kids safe.
Parental Confusion
American parents are among the most active in the world in their tireless efforts to find new ways to raise
healthy, happy human beings. An entire parenting industry has emerged in the United States, and it is devoted
to enhancing child development. Over the decades, the focus of concern and the level of adequacy that
parents feel have changed.
Parental worries of the past may seem silly by today’s standards. In the last part of the 1800s, correct posture
was a particular focus of childrearing, so much so that adolescents were photographed in the nude to
determine whether parents were giving them enough guidance on this subject. During World War II, the effects
of germs and feeding schedules became a focus of parental concern. Guests were cautioned not to pick up the
baby, and meals were delivered by the clock.
Concerns about youngsters’ hardiness have been replaced by worries about their vulnerability to crime.
Children’s literature can be an index of the perceived sturdiness of kids: although the girl detective Nancy Drew
was originally fearless, brave and daring, in more recent versions of the mystery series, she has become a
helpless and largely decorative female.
The perceived decline of children’s sturdiness has led to a greater need for parental protection. This has
occurred across most areas of children’s development, and has often led to good results. The rise of driver
education programs, for example, has produced skilled and responsible young drivers. In the area of sexual
victimization, this has not worked as well.
In part, this is because parents have erroneous or incomplete information about criminal risk to kids and so
they can offer little practical help. Warnings about taking candy from strangers rarely equip children for the
more complex approaches of sexual predators. It would be hard to imagine a parent telling her elementary
school-age child:
· Grandpa is too eager to get you naked, so he can’t baby-sit for you.
· Your stepbrother likes pornography, so I don’t want him taking pictures of you.
· That priest who loves to take the boys out for fast food is off limits to you.
Instead of dealing with risks to children from familiar people, parents focus on the stranger, the person
unknown to child or parent. Media headlines describing child abduction and murder fuel the belief that the
major threat to kids is from strangers.
In trying to deal with the psychological impact of these reports, parents are quickly defeated by the enormity of
the problem. They search for an understanding of these horrible crimes, but often they are left with only the
ghastly details and the permanent imprint of news stories.
Information about sexual crimes against children is traumatizing, and most of the emergency services have
planned responses for those exposed to this kind of information. But parents have no such support, and crime
description details eat away at their sense of well-being and competence. There are no reliable ways for
parents to insure their kids’ safety in the current climate other than watching over them at all times.
In the drama of the abducted child, what is obscured is the fact that a crime like this is extremely rare—about
one in three million children are victimized in this way. When parents concentrate on abduction as the major
threat to kids, they overlook the real danger of their child being molested by someone they know.
We have sophisticated law enforcement responses in place to deal with child abduction or child rape, but we
have no such procedures for crimes within the family and acquaintance network. What’s worse, children usually
don’t report these crimes. In that rare case where a child does disclose improper behavior by grandpa or the
stepbrother, a parent has no way of evaluating the information or planning an adequate response. This may
explain the appeal of television shows like The Jerry Springer Show or The Ricki Lake Show where problems
like this are discussed, because the programs serve as a source of information that allows parents to think
about how to deal with this eventuality.
Without a good response plan, parents resort to other ways of dealing with indications of child sexual
exploitation. Sometimes a parent may refuse to see or hear sign that a youngster is being molested. The
youngster who doesn’t like his coach, hates religious instruction, always has to go back for extra music lessons
or who tells a parent that an adult is weird may be disclosing sexual exploitation in the hope that he can relieve
himself of guilt and avoid further exposure. But parents who are not in the habit of listening to a child will miss
the message if it causes them too much confusion.
When kids do disclose, it’s rarely in a manner that parents would expect, and if they spoke straightforwardly,
parents would probably be at a loss for a response:
· Mom, the guy you married wants to show me porno flicks when you’re out.
· Why does my cousin keep talking about how now I’m wearing a bra?
· Mom, your brother is always trying to rub spots off my clothes on my rear or chest.
What is a parent’s best response to these comments? Calling the police? Getting a divorce? Accusing the
person of child molesting? Parents, particularly mothers, risk an embarrassing rift in a relationship if they act,
and so often they advise the child to ”stay away from” the questionable person. Fear of wrongly accusing
someone of a dastardly act and the defensive reactions it will stir are powerful deterrents in families where
these kinds of problems surface. A parent may feel sharply conflicted in her loyalties and protective of both the
child and the other person. Avoidance and denial become the seemingly best option so that a parent takes no
action after a child mentions sexual overtures by an adult.
Sometimes there is a complete refusal to accept a child’s report of sexual abuse, and a parent says, You’re
making that up. Denial as a defense mechanism serves to protect the psyche against those threats for which
there is no protection, and here it serves its purpose: the parental psyche is protected, but the child is not. This
response recycles sexual predators who can learn what causes a child to tell and then change their tactics. The
predator, who has escaped exposure one more time, can now refine his lures. Instead of showing porno flicks
to a verbally skilled child, he may show cartoon porno flicks to a much younger child who will not be able to
identify them as such to an adult, describing them only as “Beauty and the Beast” or “Cinderella.”
The brother who rubs spots off clothes may switch to targeting children outside the family, finding them in
public places rather than in relatives’ homes. The cousin who comments on underwear may become vocal in
criticizing the “repressive thinking” of a girl who isn’t comfortable with his comments, diverting attention from his
behavior.
If the consequences of adult confusion are problematic to parents, the costs to children are staggering.
Sexual crimes against kids involve massive victimization because for each predator, there are many children
who are hurt. The National Institute of Mental Health estimates for example, that 453 convicted sexual predators
assaulted more than 67,000 children in their careers. If the consequences for children as a group are terrible,
the effects on individual victims are horrific. Molested kids are three times as likely to become substance
abusers, become teen parents, and suffer depression and suicidal risk as they mature.
The consequences for a young spirit, a child growing and learning about the world, are far worse. For an
individual youngster, abuse brings the awareness that one has been exploited, shamed, and conned for the
sinister purposes of another and the anguish that one may have been a cooperative victim. The self-
righteousness of the preferential pedophile leads him to tell a child, This is good for you; this is right, but a child
senses something quite different. And when he has been used up and discarded, or when he has passed the
age the molester prefers, then there is a profound loss of the sense of being special.
In their fear of major crimes, sometimes parents try to appease the gods of child safety by sacrificing on
smaller points. The subconscious reasoning is, Perhaps if I accept that my child may be fondled, which doesn’t
really hurt him, I‘ll be spared the horror of an abduction and murder. Or perhaps if I put the community welfare
above that of my own family, my children will find favor in the eyes of fate and remain unharmed by the dark
forces that linger at the edge of their lives. Obviously, this thinking is not voiced aloud, but it serves as a kind of
magic incantation to protect against the unthinkable.
The wider culture doesn’t offer parents much more to safeguard their kids. In fact, the attempts at protection
are ghastly, useless, or dangerous. Grimmest of all is the proliferation of child identification kits, which are
actually child corpse identification kits that are meant to identify the remains of children who have been
abducted and murdered. Surely we can do better than to offer this to our young families as a way to protect
their offspring.
The approach of expecting and teaching children to report sexual crimes has had little success because
children generally don’t report. In those cases where they do, it is usually far later, when they have become
adults. Nonetheless, we keep repeating to children that they should tell parents if anybody “bothers” them.
The result is that there is a shift in responsibility for child protection to the child because after all, if a
youngster doesn’t tell, what can you do? We expect younger and younger kids to report sex crimes when most
of them have trouble relating anything factual. We give delinquents juvenile offender status under age sixteen
because we recognize that they cannot be fully responsible for their actions, and their logic, reasoning and
memory are not good; yet we expect children far younger to serve as witnesses to sexual crimes by reporting
them. One reason that kids don’t tell is because they can’t, because they are cognitively far too undeveloped to
manage such a complex task as identifying and reporting a legal infraction.
Sexual predators force children to relate to them on a peer level, but children are immature beings who can’t
remain integrated in trying to handle something as complex as human sexuality. The legal process requires the
same kind of pseudo-adult performance when it expects kids to serve as accurate witnesses. The fact that
children can occasionally do so is useful, but it cannot be the cornerstone for exposure of criminal activity.
When children are victims of sexual crimes, they frequently cannot identify them as such because sexual
predators disguise the nature of their behavior. We have programs to prepare children for experiences like
hospitalization, so that they can identify and label their feelings and understand what is required of them, but
we have no such programs to prepare children to deal with crime victimization, although child abuse prevention
programs hold kids responsible for their own safety.
Often, parents ease their fears by assuming that kids are taught to be safe in school by child safety programs.
But these programs raise serious questions about what works, and the continuing rates of sexual offenses
against children suggest that they are far from protective.
But let’s imagine a very different world, one in which children are truly safe. They walk to school by
themselves, they take buses and subways, and they play outside and investigate the neighborhoods and cities
where they live. They are a vibrant part of religious institutions where they explore their place and purpose in
the universe, and they have lots of adventures at camp and other recreational programs. In school, they begin
to close the academic gap with the rest of the world so that their learning and achievement soar. They are
brave and smart; they understand the risks in their lives, and parents are their best allies in staying safe. Crime
statistics drop steadily, and sexual offenses against children become a relic of the dark past.
The kids sleep soundly, and it is the child molesters and pedophiles who have the nightmares. The criminals
are forever looking over their shoulders in fear of who may be after them. And there are no more laws named
for murdered children.
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