If you think an offender is grooming your child

     

Trust your gut instinct and then act on it. Sometimes parents can be afraid of how their children will react if they prohibit their child seeing a person they like, but it is important if you have concerns about a person´s relationship with a child, be willing to stop all contact immediately between your child and the potential offender. It is also important to listen for statements or questions from your child that would support your suspicions, and to encourage your child to tell you more about the time he or she spends with the person.

It may also be important for you to give your child some prevention tools to help identify inappropriate behaviour such as talking regularly about ways they can say no or protect themselves if anyone makes them feel uncomfortable.

It is also important to note that these tactics that have been put in place by the offenders are so strong that children are unaware that the sexual abuse is not happening to all children. Many children can go years before understanding that what is/has been happening, is not ok. Disclosures may not happen until a child learns about sexual behaviours in health education classes at school, watching television shows or movies that show someone´s experience of sexual assault, or if a friend or relative disclosures.

When you discover that your child has been sexually assaulted there may be an array of emotions that you could experience. These emotions range from shock, outrage, guilt, frustration, shame, fear and grief. There are some questions that may go round and round in your mind after you find out about the abuse, and looking back it might be easy to see what was really going on, but sexual abuse is the last thing that most people would expect to find in their family.

It is not your fault that you were not aware of it sooner.

It´s not your fault that the sexual assault happened.