Steps to Prevent Child Molestation Child molestation is rife throughout the world. Unfortunately, in most situations, the suspect is someone that the child is familiar with. There are a few steps you can take to ensure your child's safety and do all you can to prevent child molestation in your family moving forward. The first step is to be a nurturing parent. Make sure your children feel comfortable speaking to you about everything and anything. Often, children being molested are threatened and are too afraid to tell the truth. This may be that they have been threatened with being taken away from their or perhaps they are embarrassed about what has happened or is happening to them. Your children being able to speak to you about anything is the first step to ensuring that they will be confident enough to come to you for help if something happens to them of this nature. Rely on a very small group of trusted family and friends to care for your children when you are not at home. Be very selective when it comes to nannies, day care facilities and baby sitters. Do your research and ensure you can trust the person before leaving them alone with your child for any amount of time. Ensure you keep open communication with your children at all times and ask them questions. Ask them about their day, who they saw, where they went and what they did. Ensure you build up a level of trust with your children through open communication so that they can come to you when they need to talk about anything happening in their lives whether its trivial or something serious that needs your urgent attention. Keep an eye on the sexual offenders’ database if you are in the United States. This is a public database of all sexual offenders in your area. This can help you identify where any offenders live, so you can determine where is safe for your children to go. Knowing you have a sexual offender right next door can help you put plans and procedures in place, you can set rules for your children to follow to ensure that they don't have any interactions with your neighbor. When hiring a child caretaker, take the time to secure a reference. A quick phone call can give you complete peace of mind. You should do this on anyone that looks after your child, it enables you to leave them with confidence and it ensures that they have a solid reputation and you can enjoy your time away from home knowing they are in good hands. Taking any precautionary steps can ensure that you do all you can to reduce the risk of your child being a victim of molestation. Trust your gut and get to know the signs that children will display if they are victims of child molestation. This can range from wetting the bed to acting up with tantrums and other behavioral problems.
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