How do you train children to TELL if they are abused??

I attended a lecture on this today.

I learnt some key things. ALL predators say they can literally tell from the get go who will NOT tell. Positive types think cheerleader personality who never complain or give out about family members..also disadvantaged. Sometimes quiet. But one thing was certain ..they looked for children who never publicly divulged information about others that was negative.

How do we train children to tell?

It can be hard to do for a few reasons.

Teaching a child to report abuse can be difficult if the child doesn't understand the abuse at the time. Abuse often happens in the home, so a child will often normalize the situation even if they feel something is wrong. Then again the child may not know better. As a result it's possible for a person to realize that they were abused later in life.

Teaching about abuse can happen in schools, but must be reinforced in the home. The same is true for educational lessons as well. However this can be difficult because abusers are usually in the home with the child. So if the abuse is occurring in the home, the anti-abuse lesson may not be reinforced.

The other thing to account for is the embarrasment or shame the child may feel for speaking up. A child may still love their abuser and may not want to bring harm to that person. Then there are the children who do speak out, but aren't taken seriously. If a child's concerns are ignored, they will believe that their words have no value. Speaking up becomes even more difficult as a result.

Knowing this the best thing to do is to create an environment for the child to feel comfortable to be open and communicative. A space where a child feels they will be listened to is important in this case. Also engaging the the child in way that they won't feel guilty or ashamed is also important.

That depends on who "we" are. Parents? Teachers? Psychologists? Doctors? Relatives?

Parents could make the child feel like they are not judged whatever they might have on their minds...but then again, parents are, as I understand it, the ones who are most often exposing their children to abuse, so in those cases it's not going to happen anyway.

For me, no person could ever have made me talk except pooossibly for my parents, if they would have brought me up that way. But that didn't happen and I'm pretty extreme in that sense.

But I do think the only way to do it is to make the children trust "we."