A tremendous amount of effort over recent decades has gone to the prevention of abuse in all its forms, including the most tragic of all: child sexual abuse.
Much of that has centered around awareness raising efforts — such as teaching children the difference between good and bad touch and helping adults become more vigilant to watch for signs of abuse.
Despite significant benefits from these and other encouraging efforts, the CDC highlights “critical gaps” in the U.S. response, with “few effective evidence-based strategies available to proactively protect children from child sexual abuse.”
This U.S. agency then emphasizes our need to “increase our understanding of risk and protective factors for child sexual abuse perpetration and victimization” — which can guide, in the words of Norwegian researchers, more “targeted prevention strategies for children and adolescents.”
In addition to identifying abuse already taking place and intervening more effectively to stop it, expanded awareness could supercharge efforts to root out the underlying conditions that make abuse more likely — “ensuring that all children have safe, stable, nurturing relationships and environments,” as the CDC states.
Clear patterns in the risk-factor literature can thus act as powerful signals to guide more effective prevention strategies. Based on our review, we outline below what that might look like.
10 life patterns that increase protection
1. Helping lift families and communities out of poverty
It’s remarkable how many studies draw a connection between various economic variables — family income, father’s employment, overall socio-economic status, neighborhood poverty — and the likelihood of different kinds of child abuse taking place.
This provides one obvious lever to proactively reduce the likelihood of abuse sexually or otherwise.
By helping families find a more secure financial foundation, we can ensure that survival stress doesn’t press fathers and mothers into dark mental spaces where drugs, alcohol and aggression against children become easier to turn towards.
2. Expanding educational opportunities for mothers, fathers and children
A similarly tangible lever exists in expanding educational opportunities for everyone in a family, since less educated mothers and fathers are at a measurably greater risk for perpetrating abuse of different kinds. Less educated children are likewise at increased risk for being victimized.
When children learn within quality schools that have safeguards ensuring they are not isolated or targeted by older adolescents or staff, they are also more likely to be protected against victimization.
CDC sexual violence researchers specifically emphasize the impact of “programs that build confidence, knowledge, and leadership skills in young women” and which “ideally involves girls as leaders in planning, development and implementation.”
This aligns with increased efforts within faith communities and other organizations to provide younger girls and boys with leadership and development opportunities.
3. Helping ensure more children are raised within a healthy marriage and continue into adulthood with happy family ties
Other intervention points are highlighted in the fact that child sexual abuse is consistently associated with family disharmony and conflict, parental separation and divorce, residential instability, and children living with one parent, neither parent and non-related adults.
Any way to ward off such family disintegration should protect children from abuse of all kinds. As Nigerian researchers conclude, “it is likely that encouraging parental togetherness and family harmony would serve as a protective role against child vulnerability and abuse.”
Other researchers emphasize that a healthy family network constitutes an important “controlling element” in individuals’ lives who may otherwise become perpetrators in an isolated atmosphere detached from nourishing relationships and positive intimacy.
Efforts to “create protective environments” were identified in a 2018 review of youth sexual violence prevention interventions as showing positive evidence of impact.
4. Strengthening exhausted parents’ ability to nurture their children and create strong bonds
As reflected above, being embedded in a family atmosphere is clearly no guarantee of safety against abuse. In conditions of financial deprivation, low education, and high conflict, homes may become especially dangerous. As the number of children increases in a home, stress and vulnerability to abuse also generally appear to rise.
That makes the provision of additional support in times of heightened stress and exhaustion for parents (and other adults, including clergy, teachers, and non-profit leaders) especially crucial. Prevent Child Abuse America highlights “concrete support in times of need” and “parental resilience” — or the ability of parents to deal effectively with stress, adversity, or trauma — as two key protective factors that reduce the risk of “adverse childhood experiences.”
CDC researchers note the benefits of improving “parental outcomes” connected to stress and depression, which “influence parenting behaviors that may impact children’s risk for sexual violence perpetration.”
“Approaches that promote safe, stable and nurturing relationships and environments for children and their families are important foundational steps in a comprehensive sexual violence prevention effort,” they summarize.
Neglectful parents, by contrast, increase vulnerability partly because lack of supervision means they know little about their children’s whereabouts.
5. Surrounding children and families with layers of trustworthy social support
Parent-child connections are crucial, but they are not enough on their own to keep children safe. The research makes clear that healthy community support expands that protection, while vulnerability increases with social isolation of different kinds — from refugee and minority status to disconnection during pandemics and natural disasters.
Prevent Child Abuse America highlights “social connections” as another key protective factor. Yet again, not all “connections” are protective — with a lot depending on the attitude of surrounding people towards abuse.
While living in a safe community makes a difference, violent communities that foster an attitude that violence is acceptable make it more likely that girls meet violent, aggressive boys.
The benefit of additional support is especially apparent for children who are younger, female, sexual minorities, or disabled in some way.
One non-profit notes that grandparents “are in a particularly good position to take steps to protect the well-being of those children,” given their close relationship to families allowing them to “ask important questions, express their concerns and take extraordinary steps to protect their grandchildren.”
As reflected above, anything that makes a child more vulnerable can be taken advantage of by perpetrators. That’s also why it can be so effective to take strategic, targeted steps towards “situational crime prevention” based on the idea that potential perpetrators will be “less likely to commit abusive acts if those acts present too much risk, offer too little reward, or require too much effort.”
This is aligned with proactive steps many youth-serving organizations are now taking — including churches, schools and nonprofits — to ensure that “at least two responsible adults” are present when youth are being served and that “unguarded access” and isolated adult-child contact are avoided, including with individuals of special trust (coaches, teachers, mentors, clergy).
6. Proactively encouraging more lasting emotional healing
Since young people who struggle with various mental health challenges are also more likely to both perpetrate and be victimized sexually, it’s invaluable in terms of prevention to proactively help teens find deeper, more lasting emotional healing.
In doing so, professionals and parents need to remember that certain medical treatments can involve inadvertent side effects — such as emotional blunting and uncharacteristic indifference, as well as excessive hypersexuality and sexual aggression. That makes lifestyle-based approaches (improving sleep, nutrition, physical activity, stress level, connection, spirituality) especially helpful to consider.
Ways to boost teens’ self-image and sense of worth and identity will also make a difference, given how angst in these areas also increases vulnerability to abuse.
Since previous victimization sets up a child for future sexual victimization as an older teen and adult, proactive efforts to invite healing from previous trauma are critical. The range of effective trauma-informed services and therapies is growing and becoming more accessible every day.
CDC sexual violence researchers emphasize the proven benefits from focusing on “high-risk children who may have been exposed to violence in their homes and communities and are at risk for violence perpetration.”
Children who witness their own mother being abused (itself a form of abuse) are also more likely to experience abuse. “The message that a family history of spousal violence increases a daughter’s risk of such abuse should be widely communicated,” say researchers in Bangladesh.
7. Encouraging teens to delay sexual behavior until marriage
Research repeatedly shows that youth who are dating and sexually active at a younger age and who have multiple, casual sexual partners are at greater risk for sexual assault. By contrast, those who delay their first sexual experiences are protected against similar exploitation.
Therefore, efforts to help teenagers delay dating, and especially sexual activity, until an older age can protect against victimization — reserving physical intimacy for the kind of durable, committed relationship more likely to take place in a future marriage.
CDC researchers also highlight the proven impact on sexual violence of “teaching healthy, safe dating and intimate relationship skills to adolescents” and “promoting healthy sexuality” — as well as overall “social-emotional learning skills (e.g., empathy, conflict management, and communication).”
Canadian scholars observe that sexual promiscuity sometimes reflects poor emotional connection with parents, which “could push girls to seek affection elsewhere and to choose their partners too hastily” - ultimately exposing them to a “greater risk of ending up with a violent boy.”
For adults, of course, patterns of sexual sobriety and responsibility also makes perpetration against children far less likely; there are clear linkages in over 100 studies between out-of-control pornography usage and the abuse of women and children.
Additional support to help adults become more free of such dependency should ripple out to enhance the protection of children around them.
8. Teaching empathy, compassion and self-control to those struggling with aggression and anger
Since adults who display hostility, lack of empathy, and who accept cognitive distortions that rationalize aggression are at greater risk of perpetrating sexual violence, teaching the converse should reduce victimization risk.
But it’s not just adult perpetrators who need to learn these skills. Research confirms that conduct and disciplinary problems, fighting, rule-breaking and delinquency among young people — along with impulsivity, disinhibition and lack of self-control — increase the risk of offending against other young people.
One study of German adolescent men found that anger “predicted sexually aggressive behaviors.”
Having friends who display delinquent behaviors or who have been victimized sexually also increases the risk of teenagers perpetrating or being victimized. In addition to the higher likelihood of having a violent romantic partner, the Canadian scholars summarize, “it is through contact with friends that young people determine what they expect from a romantic relationship and what is acceptable from a romantic partner and what is not.”
The same researchers noted that “girls who feel rejected by their peers could show a greater tolerance for abusive behaviors from boys to avoid losing the relationship and ending up alone.”
In the other direction, positive peer relationships are clearly protective, with efforts to “teach healthy relationship skills” identified as impactful in a 2018 review of youth sexual violence prevention interventions.
A 2018 review of preventive interventions to reduce sexual violence among youth also emphasized that “adolescence represents a unique opportunity to promote attitudes and behaviors that could prevent intimate partner and sexual violence across the lifespan.”
9. Helping prevent youth drinking and support adults in finding freedom
One of the clearest risk factors for sexual violence against children and adults alike is the presence of drugs, alcohol and other substances. Men under the influence are more likely to perpetrate all kinds of violence against children, including sexually. And adolescents using drugs and alcohol are also more likely to be victimized by men, women and older teenagers.
The opposite is also true: children not using drugs and alcohol (and not around friends who drink) are less vulnerable to being assaulted and taken advantage of sexually. And adults who are not losing control through drugs and alcohol are also more likely to keep the children around them safe.
It will naturally pay real dividends to expand resources that help prevent substance abuse and to assist those — young and old — who have fallen prey to addiction to find lasting freedom.
Indeed, controlling drugs and alcohol is also one of the well-established “situational crime prevention” techniques proven to reduce opportunities for assault and other crimes.
10. Embedding children in a healthy spiritual/religious atmosphere
Studies repeatedly confirm that youth who attend church frequently have less risk for abuse of various kinds, including sexual violence. That appears to be connected, in part, to how religious identity and associated teachings impact other lifestyle patterns (fewer negative friends, less risky sex, and less substance abuse).
Helping youth connect with a spiritual foundation is another way to make a protective difference. This is true for sexual minority youth as well.
More broadly, efforts to “promote social norms that protect against violence” were also identified in a 2018 review of youth sexual violence prevention interventions as showing positive evidence of impact.
Multiple, overlapping avenues of prevention
In summary, children will have very different levels of vulnerability to sexual violence depending on the atmospheres and family/community lifestyles they are being raised in. Consequently, some of the best ways to ensure children experience reduced risk for sexual exploitation may be to find ways to encourage an upbringing embedded within:
- Healthy marriages with parents willing to nurture lasting attachments to their children — with back-up support from multiple protective layers of trustworthy community connections.
- An atmosphere where education is prioritized and there are adequate resources to provide for the financial needs of the family.
- An environment where teens are encouraged to avoid drugs and alcohol, delay sexual behavior until marriage and learn how to control their anger and impulses.
- An atmosphere where youth and adults are provided with support for deeper healing when current emotional struggles exist or previous abuse has taken place.
- An environment where faith, spirituality and religious community provide children and parents with higher purpose and deeper meaning to life.
According to the available research literature, a child raised in this kind of a context will be significantly less likely to be victimized sexually (and by other forms of abuse), compared with a child raised within an atmosphere of conflicted or broken families, neglectful parents, poor education, financial deficits, spiritual detachment, few healing resources, substance abuse, sexual promiscuity, community acceptance of aggression and out of control anger.
If you or someone you love has experienced sexual assault of any kind and need additional support in the U.S., contact the National Sexual Assault Hotline (1-800-656-HOPE)- with virtual and text-based options available. This is a confidential networking service in the U.S. helping connect victims with local agencies who can offer therapeutic support across the country. Similar kinds of hotlines exist in many countries around the world.