Best Protection from Sexual Abuse for Your Child

Yesterday I watched Oprah interview 4 convicted child molesters, 3 of whom molested a family member. I know we’ve all heard horror stories of young children’s violations and the long-term price these young people pay.

This is not one of those stories. This post is about what best protects your child from sexual abuse or any other kind of abuse by others.

I learned several interesting facts I’d like to share with you.

1. Molesters ‘groom’ their targets. They gain their trust by being nice to them then begin touching them in non-sexual ways and gradually moving on to more intimate touching. They consciously manipulate their prey.

2. All four molesters believed they were giving the young children pleasure, not pain. This came as a real shocker to me. Yet when I thought about it, I realized abusers do not have the emotional awareness and maturity to realize the emotional impact of what they are doing.

I see these men as profoundly emotionally injured and hurt little boys, trying to find love and connection in the best way they knew how. They are not bad or mean people. They are confused and hurting people and deserve our compassion. AND this does not make it acceptable in any way that they violated these young people in the ways they did.

Here is the most important information for parents to remember and act upon to best protect your child from sexual abuse:

When these emotionally-hurting men looked around for a young person to molest, they looked for a child who was struggling emotionally and in need of someone to love them. These men looked for anger and retaliation toward their parents and not feeling connected and loved by their parents.

These molesters avoided children with high self-confidence and self-esteem and children who had trusting, close relationships with their parents! These children were not approachable because of their inner strength and had the confidence to tell someone.

This is just the way a lion or cheetah in Africa hunts. It doesn’t look for the strongest gazelle in the middle of the herd. She picks the easy prey, the one off by itself, the small, weak, or injured one as her target.

So the best way to protect your child from any form of abuse is high self-confidence, self-love and a strong loving emotional connection with you. Children who feel loved and self-loving have much better skills to take good care of themselves in all situations.

If you have any doubts, concerns, or questions about your child’s feelings of confidence, self-love and feeling loved by you, look deeper. Take action instead of waiting for a crisis or larger issue, like an abuse, drugs or bullying, to rear its ugly head.

If you’d like my help nurturing your child’s emotional wellness and bringing out his best, join me in my next Joyous Parenting Training starting July 7.