Last night I attended a deeply powerful evening of talks to raise awareness about the dangers of sexual abuse.  The talks were given by a psychologist, a Beit Shemesh police officer in charge of sexual abuse investigations, and three survivors of abuse who each shared part of their personal stories.

I took notes to share with you what was said but to sum up each talk would take away from them all.  Instead, I’ll share what I felt the takeaway messages from the event were.

Sexual abuse is pervasive, it is deeply damaging, and it is only by becoming educated that we can combat this horrific scourge.

The first step towards protecting our children and community from sexual predators is understanding what the problem is.  Sexual predators are in every community, in every city and they don’t look like the pervert that you learned as a young child to stay away from – you know, the derelict wino with a bottle in a paper bag and grubby fingernails. They usually look just like the kind of person you’d trust your child with – they work very hard to cultivate this image because it’s this facade that gains them access to children.

80 – 90% of abusers are someone the child knows.  To me, this means that a big chunk of our efforts and awareness needs to go towards making sure that adults or older children whom our children spent time with don’t have have unsupervised one-on-one time together.  Please read what I wrote here about the grooming process; it’s critical to understand how predators operate.

Years ago, I remember a classmate years ago sharing some information with me when I was about 11.  Being the age that I was, I heard what she described but wasn’t able to process what she was saying.  I now understand that she was raped in the public bathrooms on a class trip.  At that time, I told her to tell the teacher and she told me the teacher told her she was making it up and not to talk to anyone about it.

This response sounds really horrible – and it is.  And unfortunately it’s very common.

How in the world can we rub salt on the gaping emotional and physical wounds that abused children have already experienced by responding like this?

We deny what is uncomfortable because it’s easier to look away than to deal with the uncomfortable truths in front of us.   It’s easier to blame the victim than deal with the abuser, easier to say a child is making something up than to believe that someone we think is trustworthy is capable of horrendous actions.  This is part of what this evening was about, to get people to stop looking away and denying the pain of victims and start recognizing and taking steps to limit the damage of sexual predators.

The religious Jewish community has unfortunately historically been more supportive of abusers than victims, but this is changing as people become more educated. To make our communities safe for children we need to stop keeping sick and unhealthy secrets; we need to stop pretending that this doesn’t happen in our communities.  It does and it happens much more than it should because we’ve been focusing on looking good and keeping our image untarnished rather than on doing good and confronting evil.  Looking away empowers and protects predators and dramatically increases the risk for our children.

After hearing all of this information, it leaves a parent saying, “Okay, we understand how serious this is, but how in the world can we protect our kids from something so pervasive?” It’s frightening and overwhelming – after all, we can’t watch our kids every minute and it seems that short of that there’s no way to keep our kids safe.

A very helpful booklet filled with information was given out to attendees that covers prevention tips, red flag warning signs of potential sex offenders, boundaries, common tricks and lures, 10 proactive strategies for parents, facts and statistics, an explanation of grooming and more.  You can go to www.safelyeverafter.com to read more information.

The part I personally struggle with about talking to my kids about this is not scaring them.  As a parent I have to do my part to proactively protect them, but there are situations when I’m not around that they need to know what is appropriate or what isn’t, and how to respond when something doesn’t feel right to them.

I don’t want them to feel the world is filled with scary, dangerous people waiting to hurt them but I also don’t want to casually give over information and downplay it to the point that it seems I’m saying something unimportant.  So what to do?

Rather than this being a bigger conversation that takes place a couple of times a year, I think an ongoing conversation is a way to discuss this in a way that doesn’t feel so intense and scary.  Talking about it in this way also increases the likelihood that our kids will better internalize the information.  Our focus should be on how to empower our kids with this information.

I’ve always stressed to my kids to listen to their instincts even if logically they can’t understand why they feel that way.  I’ve also continually stressed to them to respect one another’s boundaries, that the parts of the body covered by a bathing suit are private and that if anyone tells them to keep a secret to tell me right away.   These are all included in the ten basic rules.  Something I haven’t done but after reading the handouts is to practice with them different responses they can use if they felt uncomfortable in a situation.

Avivah

Sexual abuse is deeply damaging to a child with numerous long term ramifications.  It strikes at the heart of who they are and affects their sense of security and trust in the world forever.

As parents, it’s critical that we learn as much as we can in order to protect our children from sexual predators.  When we keep quiet about this sensitive topic, we give our power to the people who want to exploit our children.

This Sunday night (April 26), there will be an evening of education and awareness in Ramat Beit Shemesh that I plan to attend.  There will be another event on Monday night, April 27 in Jerusalem.

Below are details copied from the Jewish Community Watch (JCW) website:

For the events in Beit Shemesh and Jerusalem, JCW will team up with Magen, a child protection organization from Beit Shemesh, Israel. Magen was founded in 2010 as a response to a series of cases of child abuse in Beit Shemesh and out of concern of the alarmingly low levels of reported child abuse, indicating that many incidents were not being reported to the authorities.

The upcoming events in Beit Shemesh and Jerusalem will be mostly in English and the speakers will include:

CEO of Magen – David Morris

Founder of JCW – Meyer Seewald

Abuse survivor – Eli Nash

Chief of Detectives – Dudi Katz

Trauma Psychologist – Dr. Norman Goldwasser

An anonymous abuse survivor and member of the IDF

Founder and CEO of JCW Meyer Seewald said: “JCW was founded in response to ONE case of abuse in ONE neighborhood in Brooklyn NY.  In less than four years, it has grown into an international organization. The reason is that the Orthodox community is sick and tired of the cover-ups, and sick of protecting the abusers instead of our innocent children.  We have started seeing a turnaround in the attitude towards abuse in the Orthodox community in the U.S. and we will work with our partners towards the same results in Israel.

“Israel presents a unique set of challenges, because there is a far stricter censorship in the media and there is no sex offender’s registry.  Many parents are therefore unaware of abusers living in their midst. In addition, despite Halachik rulings from some of the leading Rabbis, many communities do not report abuse to the police. There is also the very troubling reality that Israel has become a safe haven for Jewish predators from around the world.”

David Morris, CEO of Magen said: “The shame, isolation, and pain suffered by victims of child sexual abuse is universal and in all our communities. This follows victims and survivors the world over. Therefore, the solution must be to join forces and tackle this devastating problem on an international level. We are therefore excited that Jewish Community Watch, pioneers in Jewish child sexual abuse victims advocacy in the U.S.A., will be joining Magen, the child protection agency here in Israel, to break through the silence and to bring increased awareness of the terrible issue of child abuse to our communities. We are planning that this will be the first of many opportunities for Magen to work together with JCW in support of victims and survivors of child sexual abuse.”

The day after a previous event in the United States, JCW received the following message from an attendee: “Last night’s event was probably the most important event I’ve ever been to. The honesty, rawness, humanity and bravery that was shown by every single speaker and survivor affected me so deeply I really can’t describe it. [The speakers] who were so courageous in sharing their stories just saved countless lives. I have never been prouder to be Jewish than I was last night, when we all stood together and sent a message to the abusers and cowardly murderers that they will never again be free to lay a hand on anyone, with the help of JCW.”

Event Details:

Sunday, April 26 at 7:00pm, Ahavat Tzion Hall: 2 Nachal Timna Street, Ramat Bet Shemesh

Monday, April 27 at 7:00pm, Yeshurn Synagogue, 44 King George Street, Jerusalem

For more information about Jewish Community Watch, visit http://www.jewishcommunitywatch.org/

For more information about Magen, visit: http://magenprotects.org/

I wish sexual abuse wasn’t a reality but it is, and ignoring uncomfortable topics only puts our children at risk.  Please join me in attending one of these events to learn how to protect our most precious gift, our children.

Avivah

Pesach was wonderful but I don’t have much time to reflect on it since I’m due in Haifa by 10am Sunday morning!

Back in January, the surgeon put Yirmiyahu (2.5 yr.) on the priority list for surgery after I told him we planned to move to RBS in the summer.  (The surgery is to correct vesicoureteral reflux of the bladder that has caused kidney swelling and scarring; the doctors were hoping it would improve on it’s own but it’s remained at the level five degree of risk, which is the most severe.)

Surprisingly, just a month ago I got a notification that Yirmiyahu was scheduled for surgery immediately after Pesach – I didn’t expect something that soon.  At that point I reevaluated if it was a good idea to move before Pesach since this would complicate things for us.  But we decided to go ahead with the move and also go ahead with the surgery as planned rather than have to find a new surgeon in a different part of the country and wait months before it could be rescheduled.  It’s important to have this done and we don’t want to delay.

We need to be there a day before the surgery is scheduled to take care of the prep; the actual surgery is scheduled for Monday morning.

Yirmiyahu and I hope to be home in three days.  I won’t have online access until we get back but I thank you in advance for any good wishes and prayers!

If you would like to say a prayer that the surgery is successful and that Yirmiyahu has an easy and complete healing, I would deeply appreciate it – his name is Yirmiyahu ben Avivah Michaela.

Avivah