Sharing – Child Abuse Prevention In America (videos & articles)
We all need more education, so be sure to share it with your network as well, especially with people who have kids or work with them.
We all need more education, so be sure to share it with your network as well, especially with people who have kids or work with them.
This resource seems like something worth sharing. We spend so much time talking about online safety, banning phones until a certain age, or banning social media, and not enough time making sure we prepare kids for the dangers of being online at all. It’s like banning a child from leaving the house without a parent and then sending them to school with no skills for navigating other people on their own. At some point, kids learning about appropriate and inappropriate behavior and having a safe place to talk about it has to be the priority.
As Whitney says, and I agree, the real work is in the complexities. That goes for our own mental health issues, healing from abuse, and social issues regarding these topics. We aren’t going to solve the mental health crisis by getting people to exercise more. It might help some people, but that one explanation will not work for everyone. We are all much more complex than that simple “fix” would lead us to believe, but believing it reduces the cognitive load of figuring out how to help millions of individuals.
This is why that quote above rang true for me. You can’t act rationally if acting doesn’t feel safe, and many of us grew up never feeling safe. To our mind, staying silent and still was the rational choice. Doing something different could have been more dangerous. It was also the natural reaction because we were simply overwhelmed.
As a survivor of childhood abuse, I don’t know if these being in place would have changed whether I reported it. For many of us, where abuse happens within the family, that’s a very complex question. What I do know is that those three things did not appear to exist, and that guaranteed I would not tell anyone about it until I was an adult, let alone report it.
And this is the core. Mental Health awareness is great, but the political will to solve some of the core issues that lead to increased mental health difficulty doesn’t exist. There is ample evidence that poverty, domestic abuse, bigotry, harassment, etc., lead to higher numbers of people struggling with their mental health, and we do nothing to prevent that.