Beyond Stranger Danger: Smart Parents Raising Safe Kids

By Chris Iverson and Don Howell

This book is intended to be a game changer on how America addresses the victimization of children. For decades we have heard, I never told anyone I was being touched, when we should have been hearing, No one ever asked if I was being touched. This may sound like a simple shift in perspective, but it's so much more. Think of the molested child or adult who has been telling themselves for decades, I never told anyone. The very statement implies that the child/adult is somehow at fault for not telling. When we grow up, we tend to forget how we perceived the world as children. As adults with fully developed brains and the gift of hindsight, we look back, see what happened, and say, I should have told someone or I should have done something different or I should have stopped it somehow. What people forget is that during the time of the molestation, they had the brain power of a child and therefore didn't have the ability to think their way out of the situation.Part of this thought process comes from the mantra, if someone touches you, tell someone. This sounds perfectly smart from an adult point of view, but to a child it makes little or no sense at all. Can a four year old distinguish between bath time touching and something more sinister? How many times a day do we ask our children, "Did you brush your teeth?" or "Did you clean your room?" or "Did you hit your sister?" We have to keep asking because children, by their very nature, don't volunteer a lot of information, especially if they think it is bad information. Few children come up and announce "I didn't clean my room today" or "I decided not to do my homework" or "I haven't brushed my teeth in a week". Children just don't work that way, yet we have routinely placed the responsibility of identifying child molestation on their shoulders. This simply does not work.If you were molested as a child and have been carrying around the burden that you never told, does it change your thinking - perhaps provide a small measure of comfort - to know that the truth is no one ever asked? Because this is probably what happened; no one ever asked.Parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles and other adults need to ask the question. That's what this book is about - changing the entire approach and in doing so creating an opportunity to drastically reduce the incidents of child molestation.The other part of this change is to know what to look for and how to understand what your children are actually saying. This book lays all of that out; it tells you the secrets molesters don't want you to know.Society doesn't need to be afraid of sex offenders. Society needs to understand how they think and what they do. Safety comes from knowledge, not fear. The first step is to understand that child molesters are not hiding behind every mailbox. Your children are probably quite safe. When you change the game from a child telling, to an adult asking, your children will be even safer.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0692661743
• ISBN13: 9780692661741
• Release Date: January 2017
• Publisher: Don Howell-Chris Iverson
• Length: 144 Pages