As I read about the South Florida families suing Roblox after their daughters were sexually abused or sexually exploited by child predators they met online, I could have predicted much of the subsequent story as soon as I got through the first sentence.
Child predators follow predictable patterns. They’re like a football team that keeps winning with a single play and has nobody watching the tapes to notice. But if we just started teaching families and children to recognize and defend against it, we could change the trajectory of a public health emergency that has gone on for far too long.
The exploitation of children online has become such a widespread problem that it can safely be considered universal. However, while statistics tell us that these crimes are disturbingly common, it still feels horrifying when an arrest happens close to home. A teacher at my children’s school was arrested in January on child sexual abuse materials charges. Not surprisingly, this felt like an appalling event for our school community.
Our Head of School invited me to speak at a community forum discussing the case, to provide guidance for parents on how to discuss this teacher’s arrest and the broader topics of pornography and sexual abuse with children. I am a pediatric emergency medicine physician, and I work with children who have been sexually assaulted and sexually abused as part of my job.
While my role at this event was to provide families with some direction on how to best engage and protect their kids, I also learned quite a bit myself. Our school runs from Pre-K through 12, and so I shared how to best speak with children of all ages about sexual abuse and child predators. I provided guidance regarding what behaviors parents should instruct their children to look out for and how to guide their children to respond if necessary. I spoke about pornography, child sexual abuse images, and why talking to kids about pornography early on matters.
After my talk, I received an avalanche of communications from parents, all saying a version of the same thing, which is that nobody had ever spoken to them about any of this before. Of course, I understand that talking to kids about sex is uncomfortable for most people, but I had not previously appreciated exactly how little counsel parents receive on this topic.
A study by the Crimes Against Children Research Center shows one in five girls and one in 20 boys are the victims of sexual abuse. Of the babies born in the United States this year, hundreds of thousands of them are expected to experience sexual abuse, and it is estimated that there are 42 million adult survivors of sexual abuse in the United States presently.
These are staggering numbers, so why are we not talking to children about such a common and serious threat? How is it that parents are not given frequent and detailed guidance on what conversations they should be having to best protect their children? Why do we only talk about sexual abuse in the context of a crisis and never focus on preventing the next one?
To sexually abuse a child, predators must achieve three prerequisites: access to a child who is perceived to be a potential victim, compliance from the child, and secrecy. Therefore, protecting children from sexual abuse requires a three-pronged approach. Parents need to be mindful of who has access to their children and how their children are perceived. Parents and children need to learn what grooming behaviors look like and how to respond, to avoid compliance. And lastly, it should be broadly understood that adults should never be instructing kids to keep secrets.
Child predators use our society’s baseline discomfort talking about sex and they use our shame and silence to their own advantage. If we make talking to kids about sexual abuse a standard part of injury prevention in childhood, just as we talk to them about so many other topics, maybe we can start to combat an epidemic that has lived in the shadows for far too long.
Bronwen Carroll is a pediatric emergency medicine physician at Boston Medical Center and assistant professor of pediatrics at Boston University Chobanian and Avedisian School of Medicine. She is a mother of four and an author currently writing a book about how to talk to our kids about preventing sexual abuse. Visit her website at bronwencarrollmd.com and follow her on Instagram at @bronwencarrollmd.