How the Christian Sexual Ethic Reduces Risk of Child Abuse

We have normalized a dangerous world for children.

It was always something with this family. At this point, every teacher at the day care had written up a troubling observation based on something the kids had said or done, and the folder was bursting with these notes. One girl had showed up caked in dried dog feces. One had showed up without socks or underwear. More than once, their mom had dropped them off while clearly intoxicated before driving away. They were always at day care from open to close. They rarely had weather-appropriate clothing. They slept at a different place with a different stranger every few days. I could go on and on.

But this was different. Far more troubling, it was too late. The preschool girl had picked up a habit of running up to other kids’ dads and touching them on the genitals.

I knew sexual abuse had occurred. I probably wasn’t the only one who had expected it to happen sooner or later. One of the other teachers acted as if this little girl were consciously doing something wrong, and informed the mother about the behavior with an anxiety-ridden, judgmental attitude. As I clocked out and walked home that night, I witnessed this mom bending over her daughter, jabbing an accusing finger, and lecturing her on what to do if a man ever touched her. Again, the attitude seemed to be that the preschooler had done something wrong.

She was five.

This was not happening because a little girl hungry for affection had lacked the wisdom and strength to stand up for herself. It was happening because one of the nameless drug zombies we sometimes saw trailing behind Mom had gotten enterprising while Mom was passed out. But sure, let’s give her a talk about what she should do if somebody touches her.

“Stranger Danger” doesn’t help, it does damage.

According to one 2000 study, 59% sexually abused children know the person who abused them. Thirty-four percent are related to the perpetrator. Only seven percent are abused by a stranger. Dr. Elizabeth L. Jeglic argues, “By basing our prevention strategies upon antiquated stereotypes of who a perpetrator is (i.e. the adult male stranger in the white van) — we put our children at risk. It is easier for everyone to believe that those who could harm our children are horrible monsters that are easily identifiable — but the truth is that those who abuse our children live among us. Consequently, parents and guardians can fail to recognize red flag behaviors such as those involved in sexual grooming because the potential perpetrator is someone they know, likely trust and perhaps even love.”

I see far too many dating profiles that include a picture of the woman’s child, warning, “If you can’t handle both of us, don’t waste my time!” and advertising, “Looking to settle down!” It’s laughably easy for a pedophile to browse this database of children, befriend their moms, and present himself as “the dad who steps up.” Similarly, a woman can come alongside this mom as a supportive friend, only to groom or traffic those children in private.

The stranger, though a stranger, is our neighbor and plays an important part in the community we depend on — even today, when that community is so seemingly disjointed and divided. In 2020, a study measuring skin tension in people listening to distressing noises found that test subjects were better able to manage fear and stress if someone else was nearby. It wasn’t just irrelevant that the nearby person was unfamiliar to the test subject. It even helped that the person was unfamiliar. Professor Grit Hein explains, “Interestingly, the anxiety-reducing effect was stronger when the subjects perceived the other person as less similar — probably because they then assumed that the other person, unlike themselves, was not afraid.”

I am a socially lame introvert married to an even more socially lame introvert. Our kids don’t need to be told that the world is full of scary, bad people. I have tried my best to encourage the kids to be outgoing and friendly so they can have a somewhat less painful existence than their parents do. One morning, as my son waved hello to a passing homeless guy, the man turned back to me and warned that I shouldn’t let my kids be so friendly to strangers. He may have had a point, since he’d probably spent the night on guard against knife-wielding meth heads, but I gave a shrug and said, “I’ll worry about that. He can just worry about social skills.”

It seems to me that warning a child about strangers before they’re ready to be responsible for their own safety can cause two problems: 1) the child may be too afraid of everyone he doesn’t know, and 2) the child may blame himself when something goes wrong. Now six, my son is still eager to talk to anyone he meets on the sidewalk or in the grocery store, but he’s aware that “bad guys” exist, that he should never leave with someone he meets out in the wild, and that our street isn’t a safe place to be alone at night.

There are proven methods for protecting your kids from sexual abuse:

1. Understand how grooming works. According to this article, “It is estimated that about half of all cases of child sexual abuse involve sexual grooming.” Grooming can closely mimic normal, healthy relationships. It can be unsolicited comments, touching, isolation, desensitization, sharing porn, or merely intimate friendships formed in private (as often happens online). In one infamous case, a 14-year-old boy was groomed and lured to his death via Xbox Live. When my husband and I were teens, we chatted online with a 28-year-old man who was cohabiting with a minor and vocal about his enjoyment of porn. We saw ourselves as his equals at the time, but now we look back and wonder, “Why was that guy talking to us?” Kids will also groom each other; it happened to one of our foster kids at age twelve, who went on to form cloying friendships with school friends with the object of helping them “discover” their sexuality. Adults as well as children can be groomed by predators. In fact, some predators entrap parents in shameful affairs, even causing them to divorce, so as to better manipulate them and abuse their kids. As the sacred memes say, “You are not immune to propaganda.”

2. Allow your children to practice boundaries. Don’t change the baby’s clothes in public (I’ve failed at this one!). This keeps them from growing up thinking nakedness with strangers is normal. If your toddler doesn’t want to cuddle, don’t make him. If your child is uncomfortable with trying something new (such as getting into the pool), give them time. This sends the message that they are individuals rather than extensions of you, their bodies are their own property, and they do have the authority to keep their bodies private. It helps them recognize when someone crosses that line.

3. Teach them what their body parts are called. Even when children are invited to answer questions like, “What happened?” or “Did someone hurt you?” they struggle to clearly explain the story. I once sat in on the trial of a man accused of molesting three kids in my home school group (another “Mom’s boyfriend” situation), and one of the witnesses had apparently stated that, afterwards, “white stuff” came out of her butt. That was pretty incriminating! My daughter once told me I have a “good butt” (like hers) but her brother “has a worm.” I realized I needed to explain what those body parts were so that she could tell me if someone hurt her.

4. Tell your kids the truth gradually, when they’re ready to hear it. Explain where baby animals come from. When your child playfully smacks someone’s butt, explain to her that we don’t touch people in private places. If your child starts touching himself (which is not so unusual and not necessarily a sign of abuse), remind him that he should not be around others when he does that. If she climbs into bed with someone and kisses them, tell her she is not in trouble but that’s something she should only do with her husband. Living in the real world and reasonable access to various media will continue to provide opportunities for discussing sexual matters and providing context. It takes very little from the parent for the child to realize, “Ah, this thing on the TV is not something we approve of.” The idea is not to shield your kids from every situation where something inappropriate might occur, but rather to make sure they’re mature enough to handle increasingly complex situations before they’re thrust into those situations.

5. Marry your child’s parent. There are, of course, exceptions here. Too many Christians seem to think that marriage, not repentance, erases the sin of fornication, and pardon me but I don’t think I want my underage daughter marrying the adult man who impregnated her — that guy sucks. That being said, assuming husband and wife are not monsters, marriage is the most stable foundation for a family. Most people naturally love their children, as their children naturally desire to be known and understood by their parents. More importantly, there’s a cuss ton of data supporting monogamous marriage as child abuse prevention: children born into polygamous families have higher “rates of child neglect, abuse, accidental death, homicide and intra-household conflict,” according to University of British Columbia. According to this NIS-4 report, “sexual abuse is much more likely in single parent (4.8 times), other married parents (10 times) and single parent with a cohabiting partner (19.8 times) households than in married biological parent homes. Indeed, ‘only’ 1 child in every 2,000 living with married biological parents is sexually abused while nearly 20 in every 2,000 children living in a home with a single parent with a cohabiting partner is abused. There is no denying that this living demographic greatly increases the risk of sexual abuse (as well as all other forms of abuse).” In her viral video, “My Parents Were Pedophiles,” Lisa states, “A single mother with issues is a pedophile magnet.” Funny how the editorials and talk shows don’t mention that little tidbit when they’re freeing women from the shackles of patriarchy. Priorities, I guess. I’ve read many reports from various countries with somewhat varying statistics, but all were in agreement that the children living with their married biological parents were the children least at risk for any type of abuse. The best way to protect your kids is to form a stable home environment for them to be born into. Even if you don’t have kids, the best way to protect kids in general is to enforce (with your personal choices) marital faithfulness as a societal norm and celibacy as the only acceptable alternative. Your cooms come second to ending systemic child abuse.

   

6. Stay faithful. The vast majority of missing children were abducted by a parent during a custody battle. While that parent is unlikely to otherwise abuse their child, being deprived of a healthy attachment to the other parent is abuse enough. Even during an “amicable” divorce, the child is likely to lose the majority of contact with one parent. Brooke Schwartz writes, “During and after the divorce, children may show signs of separation anxiety, seek excessive closeness with other adults, or even develop Reactive Attachment Disorder—a mental health diagnosis characterized by persistent difficulty establishing and maintaining a close relationship with others, poor emotional control, and withdrawal from social interaction.” Losing a parent, or merely staying with them a fraction of the year, can have a traumatic impact.

7. Consider home schooling. Naturally, home school families don’t make the news unless they’ve done something awful, and children of dysfunctional families are often the loudest. However, the paragraph above shows one in 2,000 children being abused by their biological family, the demographic most likely to home school. That’s .05 percent. By contrast, “The best data available suggest that nearly 10 percent of American students are targets of unwanted sexual attention by public school employees—ranging from sexual comments to rape—at some point during their school-age years” (according to the U.S. Department of Education in 2004) and “student-on-student assault in schools is seven times more prevalent than adult-on-child sexual assault” according to 2022 statistics. While I am in no way diminishing the abuse that some home schoolers have suffered, I just have a hard time believing that the kids who are with me all day aren’t a bit safer than the ones in K-12 day care. The high marks home schoolers earn is more evidence that they aren’t generally distracted by dark matters like abuse, as abused kids tend to struggle academically. Additionally, although non-family abductions are rare, “attempted abductions occur more often when a child is going to or from school or school-related activities.” It isn’t reasonable to expect a handful of teachers to make sure a thousand kids leave with the right person.

8. Be sober. Not all addicts/alcoholics are child abusers, of course — it’s natural to fiercely love your children! But it’s much easier to do the unthinkable when you aren’t quite yourself. Even passing out is enough. I have heard adults reflect back on their parents’ relapses and say it felt like abandonment. And of course, any predator who knows you’ll be routinely passed out will hang around waiting for that opportunity. The monster under your child’s bed might be the drinking buddy keeping you supplied.

9. Keep your kids off the internet. We all reach adulthood knowing, from tradition, that children shouldn’t cross the street alone. However, there are no traditions for the new technologies. We need to develop new ones so that parents have a general idea of how to take responsibility for their children’s online safety. Kids should not be in the videos and photos you post, they should not be on social media, and they should not see porn. Pedophiles can and will share parents’ posts with each other. In 2021, Meta estimated that 100,000 minors received unsolicited nude pictures daily through private messages on Facebook and Instagram. As for porn, we’ve all heard the obvious: porn doesn’t create realistic expectations; but that’s just the beginning. Children emulate absolutely everything they see adults doing. Pediatric Nurse Heidi Olson argues “that porn grooms children to accept violence and/or abuse in relationships,” and she brought data to back it up. Or take the state of Missouri, which saw 2,000 cases of child-on-child sexual violence in five months instead of what used to be a typical 500 in twelve. Maybe that’s why an 11-year-old in my city raped a four-year-old. At the park. Twice. The average age a child is exposed to porn is now 7-13 years. Why? Because they have devices with internet access. Obviously, you can’t keep kids offline forever, but I think a good household rule would be 1) preteens don’t need smart phones and 2) anything with web access should be stationary (think desktop computer) in a public room (like the living room). Know what they’re looking at so you can have a talk if they stumble across adult content. If your child’s friend has their own smart phone and unconcerned parents, it might not be a good idea to let them play together alone.

10. Don’t accept porn use as “normal.” Peer-reviewed neuroscience studies show that porn can be addictive, and prolonged porn use can condition sexual responses to unhealthy input. Although he never admitted to his magnum opus of raping, murdering, and biting 12-year-old Kimberly Leach, serial killer Ted Bundy casually explained on more than one occasion that he began as a simple pervert jacking off to magazines. Eventually, the fantasy wasn’t gratifying unless he actually planned out an assault. Then the fantasy wasn’t gratifying unless he attempted the assault, and so on. Coomers blatantly denied that porn had any role in Bundy’s escapades, but now, stories like Bundy’s are becoming more common. Fight the New Drug reports “that many people who consume and possess child sexual abuse material started out viewing fairly ‘normal’ or ‘vanilla’ content that escalated into an interest in more hardcore and violent images and videos… Counselors of child abusers describe what is happening as a global crisis in online child abuse. Some see offender after offender who may not have personally abused a child, but has viewed child abuse content and gotten hooked, when they otherwise wouldn’t have claimed any sexual interest in kids.” If there is less cultural tolerance for habitual porn use, there will be fewer people getting pulled into paraphilias they would otherwise avoid.

If you’re struggling, single, divorced, or unable to home school — if any of the above applies to you in some way — please understand that I’m not looking down on you and I’m not saying that your kids absolutely will be abused. These are simply societal norms that have caused the risk of children being abused to go way, way up. The past is the past. Let’s build a better future.

Almighty God, our Maker and Redeemer, we poor sinners confess to You that we are by nature sinful and unclean, and that we have sinned against You in thought, word and deed. Therefore we flee for refuge to Your infinite mercy and ask You for Christ’s sake, grant us forgiveness of all our sins, and by Your Holy Spirit increase in us true knowledge of You and of Your will and true obedience to Your Word, to the end that by Your grace we may come to eternal life, through Jesus Christ, our Lord. Amen.