All you need to know about preventing the perpetration of child sexual abuse

By Joan Tabachnick and David Prescott

What is the current state of prevention?  Stop It Now! hosted an engaging hour-long conversation with many leaders in our field about preventing the perpetration of sexual abuse.  This is particularly useful for you, as ATSA members, because you have such deep knowledge of the adults, adolescents and children who have sexually abused.  What you will hear is how YOUR knowledge is something the rest of the world needs to know.   

The discussion was part of an award ceremony, but what it offered was a rare insight from colleagues who have been doing this work for as many as 30-40 years. 

Karen Baker (former executive director of PCAR and the NSVRC), Cordelia Anderson (Preventionist extraordinaire), and David Prescott (ATSA co-blogger and past president of ATSA) spoke about what was known about sexual abuse 30 to 40 years ago.  Cordelia spoke about the profound silence around child sexual abuse.  There was nothing in the news, TV shows, or the movies that addressed this issue.   Nothing existed for treatment and the only prevention strategy was focused on stranger danger.  David talked about the lack of any general training for anyone working with children or adolescents or even adults engaging in problematic sexual behavior.  Karen echoed the comments from Cordelia and David and added that our only avenue for survivors was through crime reporting and yet these courageous individuals often faced victim blaming, shame, and the complete lack of resources for survivors.  Furthermore, the messaging was both incomplete and misleading in many ways.  Rather than convey hopelessness, these perspectives from the past decades showed us just how far we have come and the progress we have made.  There is no longer silence about this issue.  Information, training, programs, related to prevention and the focus on trauma-informed care has become the norm.  We now offer prevention strategies that reflect the reality of sexual abuse in families and communities. 

The other speakers focused their remarks on the future and what can be accomplished in the next three years.  Although Stop It Now! and ATSA have focused on the importance of preventing the perpetration of sexual abuse, the following four panel members spoke about how this perspective, especially in the last 10 years, has finally been embraced by the larger prevention community.  Ryan Shields (Assistant Professor of Criminology and Co-Chair of MASOC), Tyffani Dent (clinician, educator and Immediate Past President of ATSA), Elizabeth Letourneau (Director of the Moore Center and a past president of ATSA), and Jane Silvosky (Director of the National Center on the Sexual Behavior of Youth) each shared their insights on where the field needs to go. 

Ryan started us off, blending his background in public health and criminal justice.  Given that “we humans are story-telling creatures” he said, “part of our challenge is to describe what prevention looks like”.  It is easy to visualize how the criminal justice system works with arrests, court, judges and jails.  We need concrete stories of prevention as well.  Tyffani continued the thread that Ryan began and challenged us to tell “our” prevention stories in a way that can meet the diverse needs of diverse communities.  We need to create an overlay of these stories , our policies, and our funding to reach beyond the one solution of punishment.  She also emphasized the need to build our community efforts in collaboration with survivors.  It is so much more powerful if we tell our stories together and it can also break the isolation so many of us feel.   

Elizabeth spoke about the explosion of science and research on preventing the perpetration of sexual violence.  This means that we not only have developed perpetration prevention programs, but we are in the process of evaluating what is working.  She noted the concentration of prevention programs in the global north, not something that we had connected with before.  Even though it may not be a short term initiative, she spoke about the necessity of having government funding of these prevention programs.  Jane spoke eloquently and passionately about the need to align our work on the ground – families are not in silos like our professional communities.  They need our resources regarding sexual violence prevention but also suicide, child abuse, mental heath issues and so much more.  And we as adults need to align all of our resources around the children and around the trusted adults.  If we do want to address the complexity of these issues, families need to be able to talk about sex and relationships and the complexity of our human interactions, including pornography.  This is a multilayered conversation that needs to address spaces, both physical and electronic, that interweave the protective factors of each family and each program.  She ended with a message from youth – “This is serious and we need hope to get through.” 

The Q&A was equally engaging and multi-layered.  If you care about prevention, this is an easy hour to spend listening and learning from some of the best in our field.  Here is the LINK and you can watch the discussion starting at 20:07.

 

Blogger’s note: Joan is being modest. Although the discussion happened as described, it all took place in the context of celebrating Joan’s career as she received Stop It Now’s Founder’s Award. Congratulations, Joan!