Million Mile Reflections

By David S. Prescott, LICSW, and Kieran McCartan, PhD

ATSA’s Sexual Abuse blog reached a milestone in the past few weeks: It has now been read well over a million times. This is the blog’s 546th post, and it was recently rated as the world’s 5th most-read blog in the area of sexual abuse. We regard this last statistic as particularly welcome; ATSA’s blog focuses in different areas from those of organizations such as RAINN, NCMEC, The Centre for Expertise on Child Sexual Abuse, which often work more on raising awareness of common issues and challenges among those who have been victimized. They are less likely to focus on areas like risk assessment, treatment innovations, or the use of the polygraph.

The blog itself started as a venue for discussing studies published in the journal, Sexual Abuse. Robin Wilson was the original “blogger.” Kieran remembers getting the email to take over from Robin in the summer of 2014, he was on a train from Leeds to Bristol after having attended a Circles of Support and Accountability conference. David was already contributing at that point and then participated more regularly when Kieran came on as chief blogger. The blog became more regular moving to three or four times a month, and its content expanded into other directions: taking note of innovations in assessment and treatment, sometimes mentioning trainings or reviewing conferences, and occasionally providing reviews of multiple studies. Since 2014, Jon Brandt, Alissa Ackerman, and Kasia Uzieblo have all served as Assistant Bloggers. Others have often stepped in to provide guest posts, including Joan Tabachnick, Cordelia Anderson, members of ATSA’s Prevention Committee, Don Grubin, Norbert Ralph, and many others. We have been grateful to them all.

The aim of the blog has always been two-fold, communication and upskilling. It’s important to emphasise the importance of talking about sexual abuse and making it a true lived reality, so that people and communities and understand and own it. Because both Kieran and David write academically and professionally as part of their day jobs, they understand the importance of research and the evidence base, but academic writing is not always the best way to communicate issues to different populations. We must talk to people where they are at and in a way that appeals to them. Writing the blog has help communicate our understandings of sexual abuse and hopefully upskilled a range of populations, encouraging further debate and insight. The most important thing that the blog can do is make people stop and think; hopefully we have done this over the years.

If there has been anything we’ve learned by watching which posts garner the most attention and feedback, it has been the importance of how we all frame our messages. Guitarist and composer Frank Zappa once observed that, “The most important thing in art is the frame.” Otherwise, he observed, it’s all just a bunch of stuff on the wall. So, it is with the work of responding to and preventing sexual abuse. Several ATSA conference plenary speakers in the early and mid-2000s, along with our most recent ATSA lifetime achievement award winner Joan Tabachnick and Gail Burns Smith winner Alissa Ackerman (both past and present bloggers) have challenged us to consider how we construct our messages and arrange them in a way that meshes with the public’s highest aspirations. For example, we don’t simply work in prisons or civil commitment centers; our work really is about preventing sexual abuse from occurring and recurring. From there, we’ve learned the importance of writing tight prose for a general audience. If anything, the proof this approach lies in the fact that ATSA’s blog posts are rarely misunderstood.