The New Mental Health Crisis Hotline Could Save Lives—and Cost Them– The details about rolling this out and funding the service and all of the services callers are referred to will determine how successful it is.
How one teacher uses books to help students with emotions like anxiety, grief
Statistics show sexual abuse may be more common than you think.
I think she’s right about that last point. I’ve written many times about the stories I hear, over and over again, where people don’t want to hear about child abuse and sexual abuse. It’s too sad and dirty. It isn’t very pleasant. People don’t want to know about how much sex trafficking goes on right around us every day and the hard work we could do to solve the problem. They’d rather believe conspiracy theories and look to their “heroes,” who are nothing but con artists, to fix it for them by going on rescue missions or attacking the “elites” who are supposedly controlling all sex trafficking around the world. That seems simpler than solving the problems that make kids vulnerable to trafficking: poverty, abuse, racism, a lack of support for kids transitioning out of foster care, or LGBTQ kids whom their own families do not accept.
Those are real problems that create vulnerable kids who go on to become real victims. Fixing them will require hard work and resources from all of us.
This article has a ton of insight into why when we hear about commercial exploitation of minors, we almost never hear about male victims, despite the fact that studies show the percentage of children involved in commercial sexual exploitation is probably pretty close to 50% male. Some of the nuggets from some in depth studies:…
Many survivors struggle with any number of mental health issues through their teens and into adulthood as a result of their abuse. Anorexia, while not something I have personal experience with, is something that I know some survivors are dealing with. This look into one woman’s struggle with it may help provide a look at…
For example, if we know that kids who don’t understand boundaries, are lonely, live in stressful family situations, and do not have open communication with other people in their lives, are more likely to be sexually abused, what does that mean when a teen comes out and is not accepted by their family? Or when a blended family becomes dysfunctional, or a kid with disabilities is not taught boundaries but kept hidden away from others?
You have kids who are lonely, who don’t feel safe and loved, who don’t understand boundaries, etc.
If a kid who’s lonely and lacking in self esteem is at risk. And a kid who identifies as LGBTQ+ is at risk, can we stop for a minute and consider that it’s not being LGBTQ+ that is a risk factor, it’s how much more likely that kid is to be lonely and lacking in self-esteem?
And thus, the cycle continues. When it shouldn’t. We know what it is about disabled kids, kids from blended families, or LGBTQ+ kids that make them more prone to abuse, mental health issues, and suicide. It’s not their reality, it’s the responses to their reality that create the risk factors. The things that make them more likely to be loners, disconnected from family support, lacking safe adults to communicate with, etc.
So maybe we should focus on being more supportive of all kids?
And, since we’re on the topic and it is June. Happy Pride!
“Now consider our abuse occurring during this childhood developmental stage, before our little brains have opportunity to grow, develop and experience different perspectives. We are stuck and frozen in a time continuum with one-or-the-other or black and white thinking. Our world partly becomes defined by the perceptions we held during the abusive experience. These perceptions,…
