2-Getting the Risks in Proportion

Getting the risks in proportion

As an expert in dealing with sexual crime and domestic violence it is my job to explain what I mean by risk. It is possible for strangers to abuse and abduct children, and it is possible for any person who has unsupervised contact with a child to use the child for sexual purposes. But the probability of those things happening is quite different. It's a sad fact that most often, when a child is sexually abused, the abuser is already known to them and trusted by them.

How could a parent know which people to trust and which people to be worried about? The answer is that there is no way of knowing who might be safe just by the kind of relationship they have with a child; parents normally trust family members and friends without question. And they usually trust people in some kind of authority over a child such as teachers, youth leaders and sports coaches. Children would have very peculiar and unhealthy lives if all people in these roles weren't normally trusted. The problem is that most often it is someone close and trusted that actually abuses a child.

Charles Fortt