Stop It Now! News - September / October 2011

Stop It Now! is the only child sexual abuse prevention program to offer specialized Help Service via telephone or e-mail. Questions from last month give us a chance to highlight more Prevention Tip Sheets.   We hope these tools, along with information about new approaches to prevent child sexual abuse, will help your family and community take actions that create safety for children - and everyone.   Who We Help   In August, our Help Services staff helped dozens of people from 24 US states, and several other countries. While each situation is unique, many people who contact us often face similar situations, concerns and opportunities around preventing the sexual abuse of a child. Here are some of the people we heard from most last month:  Grandparents concerned about their families Community members concerned about a known sex offender living in their community Relatives concerned about sexualized behaviors in children and youth.    Calls and emails from people like this keep us in touch with the real-life situations we all face; concerns, challenges and resources for action. We develop and update our prevention tools in response to people like you who contact our Help Services. Take Action!  Download and share these Tip Sheets:   How Grandparents can Prevent Child Sexual Abuse  Concerned about a Sex Offender in the Neighborhood?  Signs a Child or Youth may be at Risk to Harm Another Child  Recognizing Signs Before Harm  After our recent response to "Can you profile a predator?" a reader wrote to share her story and suggest the prevention picture is incomplete until we do more to increase self-awareness in adults, particularly men. "Adults have to recognize their own internal warning signs. What if he had had the opportunity to recognize the thoughts that led to [him abusing] and get treatment BEFORE he offended? He would have done that...but the present social press is so incredibly negative that even admitting to these thoughts has dire consequences."    A pillar of our approach is the belief that helping adults and children who might sexually harm a child is a critical opportunity for prevention. We have shown that hopeful, practical responses to this challenge are not only possible, but can gain community support. Read more about one Stop It Now! campaign that targeted adults concerned about their own behavior. Enhancing the prevention opportunities for adults who want help for their own sexualized thoughts and behaviors toward children remains a core tenet of our work. Take Action!  Read and share Twelve Questions About Your Behavior Only You Can Answer.     Reshaping sex offender policy for prevention  The Association for the Treatment of Sexual Abusers (ATSA) recently released a policy paper called A Reasoned Approach: Reshaping sex offender policy to prevent child sexual abuse. We welcome this report and wholeheartedly support its three broad recommendations. The call for evidence based policy for both prevention and sex offender management is something Stop It Now! has championed for nearly 20 years. Read more. We will continue to use our programs to bring this growing knowledge base into prevention practice and policy. Take Action! Read our response and the full report  PRORehab says Stop It Now! through workplace giving We recently received welcome news from PRORehab, one of the largest physical therapy/rehabilitation clinics in the St. Louis MO area. As part of their ongoing commitment to community, their company said Stop It Now! to child sexual abuse and did their part to make sure every child has a right to safety and well-being by supporting our work. PRORehab employees donated $1,151 to support our work and spoke out with a wonderful blog post. Thank you so much!  Take Action! Contact us to learn how you can help support Stop It Now! through your workplace or as an individual.  Together we can prevent child sexual abuse.  Stop It Now!® prevents the sexual abuse of children by mobilizing adults, families and communities to take actions that protect children before they are harmed. Support us (#12223) in the Combined Federal Campaign!