SHOW LOW – April is the National Child Abuse Awareness Month. To support this, Show Low Mayor John Leech Jr. proclaimed April Child Abuse Prevention Month during the April 6th city council session in the town of Show Low.
Although April draws to a close, there is a year-round need for child abuse prevention.
Over the past 10 years, an increase in cases of adolescent-to-adolescent (child-to-child) sexual behavior has changed the prevention strategy for agencies like the Navajo County Family Advocacy Center (FAC) in Show Low.
The internet and portable devices like cell phones, tablets, laptop computers, and iPods have made it easier to find and stumble upon sexual content – especially for children.
From left, Nicole Kester, Development Director of the Family Advocacy Center, and Forensic Interviewer Katelynn Wisner, Family Advocacy Center in Navajo County. The FAC is familiar with the tools that parents can use to control and monitor inappropriate or explicit content.
The FAC staff say they saw a link between pornography and teenagers who practice what they see (in porn) on other teenagers. And they say this applies to all areas of Counties Apache and Navajo – from the north to the south end. (An adolescent is someone under the age of 18.)
“The 2020 FAC had 25% or a quarter of the cases in teenagers,” said Nicole Kester, director of the Family Advocacy Center for Development. “A total of 95% of the victims in our center knew and trusted their perpetrator.”
The FAC supported 196 victims in 2020, 43% of whom were under 9 years of age and 75% under 15 years of age.
“For adolescent or adolescent sexual activity or inappropriate behavior, children are generally the same age or within two years of each other,” says Kester. “They are peers and the behaviors are peer-to-peer.”
Today’s younger generation goes a few steps further than their parents or grandparents.
“When we were kids, there was ‘let’s play doctor’ or ‘show me yours and I’ll show you mine,’ which was pretty common and normal, says Kester. “Now the youngsters are playing out what they see instead of just showing and telling.”
The dark side of the internet
“In a lot of the cases that we see on the FAC there is some kind of internet involvement,” Kester said in an interview with the Independent. “Facebook Messenger, Instagram, chat rooms, games and TikTok are platforms where children access sexual content and where predators hide.”
“What is happening now, including access to pornographic material, is exacerbating teenagers’ sexual behavior towards teenagers,” says Katelynn Wisner, a forensic interviewer with FAC.
“Young people see everything on television, in their games, on the Internet and act out these behaviors.”
Kester and Wisner said teenagers think it’s normal and many parents don’t have conversations about what is normal or they ignore the topic entirely. And there are parents who teach that anything to do with sex and the body is bad.
“There are always predators online,” say Kester and Wisner. “Technology is extremely useful in everyday life for work, making contact with old friends, catching up with new friends – and also for education and entertainment.”
But the other side of technology that parents don’t always know about is the dark side – the side that parents may not believe their children are exposed to.
“There are websites that are geared towards children – specifically to nurture them as victims, so to speak,” says Kester. “There are child abusers who advertise and market some websites and games that get children to become more involved with sex and porn as they age.”
Gradually exposing young children to more and more sexual content is one way to desensitize them so that the predators can more easily manipulate children and adolescents as they age, explained Kester and Wisner.
“Computer or console video games now have game chat rooms that look out for kids and pretend they’re the same age,” says Kester.
Young people always have their tablets and phones in their hands, says Wisner. “They may not be looking for porn or sexual things, but they type in a few letters and a website or ad will appear that is sexual in nature and not age appropriate.”
When adults can do this, think about how easy it is for a child to accidentally access something.
“Your child could just look up video games and find video game porn,” says Kester. “You could search for a specific character in your game, but you can find sexually animated characters that someone created.”
Kester and Wisner say they don’t want to be scared of people and they don’t want parents to be over-cautious, but they want people to understand the risks of giving children unsupervised access to electronic devices.
The FAC is familiar with the tools that parents can use to control and monitor inappropriate or explicit content.
“There may be innocence that you regularly see in something like technology, but darkness is hidden in that light,” say Kestner and Wisner.
An application called Bark is something parents can use electronic devices at home to block or hide sexual, violent, or other explicit content, including thoughts of suicide. Both Kestner and Wisner have used the app and can prove its effectiveness and ease of use.
Navajo County FAC also offers free family and parenting guides to help them navigate the Internet and keep devices safe. They also have up-to-date and well-researched and proven resources that parents can use to talk to their children about body safety.
Instead of talking to teenagers about the birds and bees or human sexuality in general, the FAC teaches parents how to talk about body safety. This means that a distinction is made between “safe” and “unsafe” contacts and not between “good” and “bad” contacts.
“It removes the child’s guilt and prevents them from making a moral distinction about what is appropriate and what is not,” says Kestner.
Parents can also teach the difference between healthy and unhealthy secrets. For example, a surprise party may be okay, but “secret touches” are not okay.
“It’s not sex education; It’s about body safety and prevention, ”says Wisner. “It is important to know what you call your body, what parts you have, what parts others have.”
Parents and guardians can teach body safety within the confines of their own belief systems, says the FAC. There are ways to prevent children from being taken advantage of by someone else out of curiosity and pressure, and from taking advantage of someone else.
Kester and Wisner emphasize the importance of having conversations with your children at all ages that “open the door to a place without judgment and anger, so that they can feel more confident about speaking to you.”
The FAC plays an important role in the community by helping children and families who are victims of abuse, neglect, domestic violence, and sexual assault investigate such crimes against children.
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