Sexual Crimes Against Children Have Risen To Epidemic Rates

Of all the serious harms that could come to a child, sexual abuse is the most common.

There are a number of factors that play into the continual rise of this horrifying crime made by adults. For example, there are more mothers working than at any point in our country’s history, and the need to put children in day care facilities where they are more prone to attack than ever before. The same can be said about divorce –children are now at a higher risk of being abused by their stepparents. Finally, due mainly to the aforementioned factors, adults who were molested as children are now doing the molesting themselves.

Fact: The more children that are molested, the higher the risk for the trend to continue to get worse.

Here are a few stats to mull over:

1. One in three girls and one in six boys will have sexual contact with an adult.
2. The average molester of girls will have about fifty victims before being caught and convicted, while the average molester of boys will have on average one hundred and fifty victims before being caught and convicted.
3. Molesting doesn’t stop for abusers once they are caught. In fact, there are reports that say most molesters will have as many as three hundred victims during their “careers”.
4. The epidemic of child abuse has now reached over one-fourth of the American population.

In the past three decades there has been a significant amount of documentation regarding child abuse, but there is still very little reputable, and maybe more importantly, helpful literature, for the public to educate themselves on. So when a case is reported in the popular press people are left to wonder how it could have happened. Parents, teachers and friends are questioned as to how they were so ignorant about an abuser right in front of their faces. More notably, most people assume an abuser is a person who could not be likable when in reality that assumption is actually the complete opposite.

Or there is the phrase that people think of whenever a major and traumatic event rocks America: It would never happen here [where I live].

Wrong.

The over-assuming and smug individuals are the same people who cannot get past how any reasonable adult could have entrusted the care of children to a sexual predator.

Dr. Carla van Dam is the author of the book Identifying Child Molesters. Here is her take:

“The topic of child sexual abuse frequently engenders extreme views and emotional reactivity that only helps to distract everyone from the primary concern of creating safer environments for children.”

Child abuse is an epidemic, folks. Protecting children should be something every American believes in and wants to fight their hardest for.