At the ninth annual lecture of Tulir - Centre for the Prevention and Healing of Child Sexual Abuse, child safeguarding consultant, Lucy Faithfull Foundation, U.K., gave the audience an overview of the scope and nature of child sexual abuse and spoke about a range of measures that can be taken to prevent it. One of the thrusts of his lecture was about preventing perpetrators from doing what they do and also preventing them from repeating what they did — “It’s no service to perpetrators,” he said, “if we allow them to perpetrate.”
If there was a disease the public health system was tackling, he said, they would understand the problem before it happened and also respond to it after. And with child sexual abuse too, it was necessary to unlearn a lot of what was considered true — for instance, it is not true that most offenders do not want to or cannot stop — most stop. “If we humiliate, belittle and isolate offenders, we are creating more dangerous people,” he said. However, this did not mean that they would not be arrested — just that a message was being provided that society wanted them to stop and that there were resources to help them. A confidential online and phone service exists in the U.K., which offenders or potential offenders could call for help, he said.
The problem was, Mr. Findlater said, that most offenders did not get caught. And since most child sexual abuse victims did not disclose what had happened to them, it was not enough to merely wait for children to report the abuse — there needed to be measures in place in prevent the abuse.
Apart from trying to prevent people from offending, this included educating parents and others responsible for children, as well as putting in place strategies so that children would feel able to come forward, he said. The biggest risk to children was from people they knew — in their families and social environments, and so parents need to be educated to spot danger signs — in other adults and in children.
‘End the silence’
“Each community has to come up with strategies that work for them. Silence enables abuse — child sexual abuse is preventable and not inevitable and we have to behave accordingly,” he said.
K. Chandru, retired justice, Madras High Court, spoke of the necessity of quick trials and speedy justice in cases of child sexual abuse, citing a case where many victims turned hostile after several years and their marriages.
W. Bro. Vaidyanathan Shankar of The Millennium Lodge No. 327 said the problem must be recognised as universal and there had to be zero tolerance to it.
Rudy Fernandez of the British Deputy High Commission, Chennai participated.
