Keeping children safe

Hey there!

If you’re following us on social media you might have seen our post about the Parenting Safe Children workshop that Rob and I participated in by Feather Berkower. We learned how to keep children safe from sexual abuse.

Here are some stats and facts around the topic that I found very concerning:

Facts and numbers:

- 1 in 3 girls and 1 in 6 boys get sexually abused

- most don’t tell (or at least not immediately but years later)

- 70% of all sexual abuse cases (including rape of adults) happen to children under 17

- sibling abuse and other older children (2-3 year gap) is high (one third of all cases)

- Most sexual abuse of children occurs in a residence, typically that of the victim or perpetrator (85-90% of the abusers are known to the child)

- 96% of the abusers are men

- 95% of perpetrators were abused as children

I had the urge to spread the word and started researching the topic for 2 weeks straight. After creating a WhatsApp group for parents in Madeira who are interested in knowing how to prevent sexual abuse I had a big response of 32 parents joining.

A week later I presented my own ‘little‘ workshop (it turned out to be almost 2 hours long) at home streaming it via Zoom as well.

If you’re interested in learning how to prevent, recognize and act upon grooming and sexual abuse you can have free access to my workshop on our APTB Online Community ‘UnParenting‘ here.

Of course, my biggest motivation was to be able to keep my own children safe from sexual abuse but another reason I did the workshop with Feather was to know how to implement certain strategies into APTB to offer parents and kids who will be spending time at APTB as much safety as possible. Therefore, soon you’ll be able to find our policies on our website that will include prevention of sexual abuse.