Imaginif

Article by Megan Bayliss

Knowing what to teach your kids about staying safe from sexual predators can be daunting. Here’s the five important BITSS you need to discuss with your child, preferably as often as possible (daily is best). For ideas on games and activities to help your child remember the five important BITSS, register in our Safety Talk forum and receive a FREE 10 page Protective Play tutorial, jam packed with ideas around each of the five following important personal safety concepts.

1. Body Ownership: 

From the moment we are born our bodies belong to us. They are our human signature. Babies may need to rely on adults to care for them but each baby’s body is still unique: unique skin, tone, imprints, hair, voice, size and shape.

A newborn baby has little realisation of where their body begins and ends, so as loving parents we engage in touch, good touch, to teach our babies what is theirs and what is ours. We stroke them, massage them and put clothes on them to give a message of body ownership.

Children who are at risk of sexual abuse, or who have already been sexually assaulted often don’t have a good idea of their body size or where their body boundaries begin and end. Too frequently they fail to recognise their real size in relation to a potential perpetrator. Sometimes they think they are as big as the perpetrator and sometimes they see themselves as much smaller and helpless than everybody else in their family. This size confusion is a result of lowered self-esteem and something that perpetrators may focus on in their grooming process. For this reason it is important to teach our children body ownership and to assist in ensuring they have a healthy self-esteem. 

2. Intuition: 

Intuition is the adult term for early warning signs. It is sometimes said that females have better intuition than males because girls are much more sensitive.  Perhaps that’s only because we train our sons NOT to rely on their intuition. Not to show their feelings about things.  We like them to be rational, sensible and scientific, cut off from their feelings.  And when children are sensitive we put them down by telling them not to be girls/sissies/cry babies!? The other thing we often do when children show emotion is to tell them to grow up and act their age. Enough! Stop NOW! By training the feelings out of our children we are teaching them to not recognise and act on sexual abuse.  Today is the day we start teaching our children to recognise and listen to their early warning signs and to act on them as children. Don’t wait until they are young adults and force them to make belated safety decisions about walking alone at night or unsafe partying.  

Children need to learn the very basic rules about intuition, body warnings, while they are still young. If they don’t get it as children they will not trust their intuition as they get older. Our early warning signs, our body feelings, are nature’s way of giving us a message that something is good or bad. The worst that can happen is that we might be wrong. Better to be wrong than sexually abused! My goodness! No wonder so many children are being sexually abused. We are training the feeling out of them.

Perpetrators of child sexual abuse often pick children who are disconnected from their early warning signs, children who are unlikely to say anything even if they do have a feeling that something is wrong. Protect your child by offering activities and discussions that include listening to their body. There are some lovely storybooks about this. Buy one. Today. Read it to your child often.

3. Touch:

Any touch can turn from good to bad. So too does sexual activity and the grooming process that leads up to sexual abuse. Therefore it is important your child understands good touches/bad touches. Just as adults have the authority to say no at any time, so too do children. If someone is cuddling them and then tries to touch their private parts, children need to know this is a bad touch and they can say no and go and tell someone, even though the cuddle was good at first and they really wanted it.

Most children are familiar with the idea of bad touches out of the blue. If someone comes up to your child in the playground and hits them, this would definitely be a bad touch. If someone grabs them while they are in the shopping centre, this is a bad touch. If their sister runs off with their favourite toy, this is a bad touch. This is fairly easy for children to understand.

Many parents still teach about stranger danger and children being dragged into a car by a person who pretends to know the parents. While this does still happen and children still need to be aware of this danger, they are at FAR GREATER risk of being sexually abused by someone in their own home. Approximately eighty five percent of reported child sexual abuse is perpetrated by somebody well known to the child. It is VERY IMPORTANT that parents teach their children about how good touches can sometimes turn into bad touches. This knowledge could prevent sexual abuse by making perpetrators think twice about sexually abusing your child because your child is savvy and might tell.

Nature and our daily lives are full of examples just waiting to be used as teachable good touch/bad touch moments. The games available in the FREE Protective Play tutorial available upon registration in our Safety Talk Forum will give you some ideas to start with. I know that once you start playing with them you will see other examples all around you. Use them. I prefer to always use examples of good touches leading to bad and unwanted sexual touches but I know through experience that some parents are frightened of spoiling their child’s innocence by introducing the topic of child sexual abuse. However, while our children remain at risk of being sexually abused it is our responsibility to ensure that they know that sometimes trusted adults, including family members, can use good touches to trick them into accepting bad touches.

Just to further complicate things, sometimes children enjoy the bad sexual touches. They feel loved and wanted and think this is normal activity. This is partly due to the way our bodies are made and partly because perpetrators groom the children and other adults around them to believe this is acceptable and normal. Do not allow yourself or your children to be fooled. Have very clear boundaries (Body ownership) and use as many occasions as you can to reinforce the good touch bad touch thermometer in discussions about child sexual assault.

4. Say No:

It has always struck me as strange that while we want our children to grow into confident, assertive adults, we do not allow them to practice assertiveness as children. Although many toddlers start out saying “no” on every occasion, we soon halt this learning by telling the babies that saying “no” is not nice. Being sexually abused is not nice either and if children have been trained to never say “no” to grown ups, they become easy targets for perpetrators.

Saying “no” is not a form of disrespect. It is an example of assertiveness and intact self-esteem. Of course there will be times when “no” is an unacceptable answer from your child, for example, “Tidy your room please”, or “Hop in the car we’re going to school now”, but children with intact self esteem will usually understand there are some things that are age and family appropriate while there are some other things that just will not be tolerated.

To be able to confidently say “no”, people need practice. Children need practice while they are still children in order for them to turn into confident adults. Set up situations where you know your child will say “no”, and provide them with experiences of having their “no” listened to, and respected.

Many perpetrators will use the plea  “They didn’t say no so therefore they like it.” Don’t be fooled by this. People of all ages don’t say “no” to a sexually abusive situation because they are scared, unsure of what to do and embarrassed or confused by what is happening. For children, it is particularly difficult to say “no” to a grown up perpetrator. We have trained our children to respect adults and to do as they are told.

Are we training our children to be submissive and easy targets? As parents we want our children to be healthy and happy but we are scared that they will be out of control if they start saying “no” all the time. Think of the prevalence statistic of one in three children being sexually abused. If only these children had known they could say “no” and tell someone, they might have been spared from a life plagued by guilt, confusion and multiple abuses. Yes, once a child has been sexually assaulted they remain at risk of being sexually abused again and again. It takes a particularly strong child to be able to say “no.”  Protect your child by encouraging the use of the word “no” in appropriate situations.

5. Support Network:

The children who are most at risk of sexual abuse are those who have no support networks - those who do not have a range of trusted adults they can talk to. Whereas once we lived in extended family groups, often surrounded by grandparents and aunts and uncles, nowadays we tend to be isolated from our family, friends, and other emotional supports. We tend to live busy lives with little time for just chatting with our children or friends.

Support networks are important for all of us. Perpetrators zero in on children without supports. Worse still, perpetrators will groom a child’s supports and trick them into believing that the child is lying about sexual abuse. They isolate us from our supports in case we raise suspicions or hear other’s suspicions. The best way to counteract this is to remain in contact with our friends, to talk, to listen, and to believe.  If we do this as adults, we are modeling good relationships to our children, teaching them it’s okay to talk to others and to have lives outside the family home.

Given that some families have become isolated due to the need to travel for work or for cheaper housing, we too often have no one we know to talk to or to call on for support. This is one of the reasons why communities have Neighbourhood Centres and Women’s Centres. Isolation places us at risk and if the only supports we have are community agencies then they are there waiting for us to use them. Children also need supports. When parents are isolated and unable to model talking about problems or worries to friends, children remain at a loss as to whom they can talk to.

To learn how to protectively play, on a daily basis, and how to keep your kids safe from sexual predators, register in our Safety Talk forum to receive a link to “Parent Sense”, a ten page protective play tutorial.

Can you remember the five BITSS to help keep your kids safe?