How to Protect Your Child from Sexual Assault
Educate yourself, then educate them
According to the Centers for Disease Control, one in four girls experience sexual abuse in childhood, along with one in fourteen boys, and that is just what’s reported. Every 98 seconds, an American is sexually assaulted. Imagine if we collectively allowed that level of transmission in COVID 19 or any other pandemic that causes lasting, long-term effects that are inherently, and terrifyingly, both symptomatic and long-lasting. Abused, especially sexually abused, children are at a greater risk of continuing to experience abuse as an adult.
Years ago, a friend posted an article about ways to educate children about sex and sexual assault. My daughter was around five at the time, and my friend remarked how she’d already begun the process of teaching her much younger twins accurate names for “private parts” and sex. I was highly impressed and agreed with the psychologically sound reasons behind both the article and her actions, though my own reaction was nothing but shame. I was ashamed because I hadn’t begun this process myself. I was overwhelmed with shame because I knew I wouldn’t. In fact, I was so embarrassed and encumbered by the thought of it, the experience was that I couldn’t.
Around the age of twelve, my mother gave my brother and I the Our Bodies, Ourselves books for boys and girls and I still remember the gripping fear that came with that gift, terrified of something I didn’t understand and somehow knew my mother did not want to discuss. That was the beginning and end of my sexual education.
Myriad jokes told with reddened cheeks surround having “the talk” with children and teenagers, which is often enacted in sitcoms as a rushed, awkward, unfulfilling experience wherein the adult learns he or she knows far less than the budding young adult. Consider our cultural tendency to even refer to it as the talk, as if it were one moment, a blip we need to get over and through. Best leave sex education up to the schools, but make sure we as parents are given the right to refuse even that. Because… why?
Because… sex
In Healing the Shame That Binds You, iconic philosopher/psychologist John Bradshaw draws the important distinction between healthy and toxic shame. Essentially, healthy shame arises when we acknowledge having wronged someone or having done wrong. It is normal, essential and comes with having a conscience. In contrast, toxic shame is the feeling that who we are, rather than what we have done, is condemnable. Unfortunately, most of us are so caught up in this kind of toxic shame surrounding sexuality, there is a huge barrier to speaking with our kids about it.
So the cycle of abuse continues.
We must overcome our own toxic shame enough to speak with our kids about sex honestly, openly, and frankly
I had to educate myself first. There was no way I could talk with my daughter before I’d grappled with the reasons behind my shame at doing so. Initially, this meant acknowledging all of the things I didn’t know. This meant learning about consent.
The Legal Information Institute is a fantastic resource outlining 10 U.S. Code § 920 — Art. 120. Rape and sexual assault generally. Read it, digest it, ask questions about it, understand it. Then, make sure your children understand it. This is important because it begins the conversation about what, exactly constitutes consent in the USA.
Watching Michaela Coel’s Arabella in I May Destroy You helped me understand the nuances of rape and consent our children have to deal with in this very different world than the one most of us were raised. When Arabella outs an abuser for “stealthing,” having penetrated her without a condom under the guise of using one, she claims, “he’s not rape-adjacent or a bit rapey, he’s a rapist under UK law.” Her certainty and passion elated me because she knew she had been violated, and UK law backed this knowledge. I did nothing but blame myself for assaults that occurred to me for decades, regardless of the fact that I was a child during the majority of them. Knowledge is, quite literally, power. While not technically a crime in the US yet, there are legal arguments claiming stealthing is a form of sexual assault and should be punishable as such. I, for one, hope this happens, and hope US laws become more and more clear about the boundaries surrounding consent.
A member of the niche “Xennial” generation, I had an analog childhood and a digital adulthood, so did not sexually mature under the pressures of a social network wherein even posting a photograph without consent can be heavily problematic. The nature of sex is constantly evolving. As parents, we have a duty to our children to educate ourselves about this so we can help educate them to navigate the ever-shifting sands of this complex world.
Our children will not know if they have been raped or consented to anything if they do not understand what these terms mean. I didn’t know the brutality of my own assaults, even at the age of seven, were rape until I was forty-two. I did not understand consent, and believed not saying “no,” being pressured into saying “yes,” even being incapable of communication due to impaired ability or intoxication were all nuanced forms of agreement and therefore blame. To say such a mind frame fosters a devastating level of self-loathing is a profound understatement.
Laurie Halse Anderson, author of the powerful YA novel Speak, wrote a fantastic article on educating boys in particular about sexual assault. When discussing the rape victim in her novel, she notes that boys often believe the victim was not a victim at all, but in fact asked for it because she drank beer, danced with the perpetrator, or engaged in any of the other acts I myself believed might indicate consent, or at least lend blame. Anderson, while initially shocked at this, realized the sense in their reactions because, “their parents generally limit conversations about sex to ‘don’t get her pregnant’ lectures. They learn about sex from friends, and from internet porn, where scenes of non-consensual sex abound. No one has ever explained the laws to them. They don’t understand that consent needs to be informed, enthusiastic, sober, ongoing and freely given.”
Make sure children know that 90% of victims know their abuser.
This one is hard. Really hard. The way my partner and I handle this with our daughters, and basically the umbrella for all others, was by enforcing the number one rule in the household that no one is allowed to touch anyone else without their permission. Touch without consent can and does happen within the family, within friendships, and in the virtual world in ways that violate non-physical boundaries. Setting that boundary as an absolute, applicable to adults and children alike, provides for a concrete rule children can understand and apply when, developmentally, they are incapable of thinking much beyond concrete terms.
Sexual violence is preventable. We must collectively shift the topic of sex away from our own shame-based fears and into a collective light so bright it burns this horrific disease to the ground.
You can contact the Rape, Abuse, and Incest National Network (RAINN) hotline at 1–800–656-HOPE.
