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William D. Lindsey
Book Notes: Joelle Casteix’s The Well-Armored Child: A Parent’s Guide to Preventing Sexual Abuse
I have a book to recommend to you — particularly those of you raising children, or with friends and relatives raising children. The book will also be useful and very instructive for those committed to addressing the problem of sexual abuse of young people, as I believe many readers of this blog are. It’s Joelle Casteix’s The Well-Armored Child: A Parent’s Guide to Preventing Sexual Abuse (Austin: River Grove, 2015).
Joelle’s book arises out of her own struggle to deal with having been sexually abused as a teenager by a teacher in her Catholic school. As she tells readers in the book’s introduction, “I realized that in order to heal, I needed to make an immediate difference” (xi). As a survivor of abuse, she has recognized, that is, that her commitment to healing others (and to preventing sexual abuse of minors) has been part and parcel of her own healing process.
The book also flows from her growing recognition that the abuse prevention movement has neglected its most important resource for prevention: parents. As Joelle also notes in the book’s introduction, in her years of lecturing about child abuse throughout the United States, the question she is asked more frequently than any other question is, What can I do to keep my child safe?
If those of us without children imagine that because this challenge applies exclusively to parents — if we imagine that the problem of child abuse in our society doesn’t affect all of us — we’re badly informed. As Joelle notes, child sexual abuse represents a huge burden affecting our entire society (15):
When you add up the costs to our communities — for mental health care, police services, jails, adoption and foster care, victim services, drug and alcohol rehab, food stamps, welfare, and other social services that many victims and their families require — the price tag is staggering (ibid.).
Note: This is an Abuse Tracker excerpt. Click the title to view the full text of the original article. If the original article is no longer available, see our News Archive.