Today in 5R we had our second Child Protection session. The focus of today’s session was unwanted touch and keeping secrets. We began by dividing touch into three categories: Safe, Unsafe and Unwanted.
We defined them as:
- Unsafe: Touch that can be hurtful, kicking, pushing etc., as well as touching of private body parts.
- Safe: Touch that won’t be hurtful, and isn’t threatening.
- Unwanted: Touch that you don’t want. It might not be ill intended, but you don’t want it, like too much tickling or affection in a way that feels uncomfortable.
Most touches, we decided, are safe and fine, in fact, touch is a really necessary part of life. Then we introduced the Touching Rule.
The Touching Rule: No one should touch your private body parts except to keep you clean and healthy.
We discussed what were private parts, which we described as the parts of your body usually covered by a swim suit. We also spoke about the idea of keeping you healthy, and how even doctors shouldn’t be touching children’s private parts without their parents present.
Then we got into the focus of the lesson, secrets. We discussed who to talk to, and what secrets should never be kept.
We began by reading the book: Some Secrets Should Never be Kept, a story written to help keep kids safe from sexual abuse.
What secrets should never be kept?
- Secrets that make you feel uncomfortable or bad.
- Secrets like someone saying “never tell your parents about this…”
How do a lot of children feel when they are abused?
- ashamed, guilty, frightened, worried, nervous etc.
- many children are threatened with consequences by an abuser if they tell anyone.
- as a consequence they feel worried about how them telling what happened will impact others.
We discussed how it is against the law for an adult to touch a child’s private parts, have the child touch their private parts, or for a child to touch another child’s private parts.
The conversation then went to the subject of “What happens to an adult who is doing something abusive to children?”, and we discussed that sexual abuse was illegal and that there were punishments, that the abuser would be punished, not the child.
Eventually the discussion went towards how despite all of these very scary things that do happen, these things happen very very rarely and these discussions are not designed to make people fearful. These discussions are just designed to help us know what to do, how to be safe, in these really difficult, very frightening, but thankfully very rare, situations.
Finally, we discussed who you could tell if you came across something wrong, or something wrong happened to you. We discussed the idea of having in mind three adults (or older kids) you trust, and how children have to be brave and assertive when sharing these events. We discussed how sometimes children may even have to keep sharing with different people they trust until someone takes action to keep them safe.
This session concludes this series of lessons.
