These are three of the most urgent priorities for child-safety practitioners around the world as they take action to prevent child sexual abuse before it occurs.
There’s a growing body of evidence that child sexual abuse is preventable, not inevitable. We are also witnessing a realization in society that we’ll never catch up and keep up if we simply try to arrest our way out of the problem. But the yawning gap between seeing the solutions and getting them fully implemented demands our full attention: Across the world, one in nine children suffer abuse.
That’s 220 million children: Close to the total population of Nigeria, or the combined population of the 15 largest U.S. states.
The growing body of research data on child sexual abuse undercuts the deep public narrative that the problem all traces back to “stranger danger." It’ll take time and effort to correct those misperceptions. But we know that:
All of which points to a problem that is solvable, as long as we can unravel its complexities and scale up the effective interventions that work.
We need to understand how to scale up promising practices, as fast as we can. That’s why........