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.
Because if they don’t learn it from you, they will hear about it from these sources. Is that where you want your kids to learn about sex? If you wait too long, you’re not protecting their innocence as much as you are creating an opening for someone else to teach them a worse version.
To mark Mental Health Awareness Month, KQED compiled a list of shows related to mental health and youth mental health for listeners. If you’re looking for some mental health shows to learn from, you could do worse than browse the featured one they shared, and the link to all of their previous mental health resources….
The sexual abuse of children was something that happened when dudes in vans kidnapped children. No one mentioned that you could be sexually abused in your own home. If you asked me as a kid if I was being abused, I would have said no, even as every definition of that word applied to me. There was no education, no awareness programs, and no discussion about sexual abuse anywhere in the public sphere, so I didn’t know until I met someone in my early twenties who talked about being the victim of sexual abuse.
The use of AI is a new twist. It’s not enough to tell young boys not to send explicit selfies; they also need to understand that someone may use AI to create an explicit image of them regardless. Education must include societal-wide awareness that an image may not be what it appears to be. That has to be part of this. The extortionist’s main weapon is the shame of having explicit photos of their victim out among their friends and family. Shame is powerful. When we live in a world where anyone with an internet connection and a photo of your face can turn that into an explicit image of you, we need to eliminate the shame. There’s no shame to be had for someone else’s bad actions.
I’m linking to this not because I think we should all give up on finding a better balance between screen time and in-person time but because I want to remind all of us that simply taking away screens from someone struggling or kids is possibly taking away a lifeline, too. There are dangerous things out here on the internet, but there are also a lot of good, positive experiences.