like this???
How they’re using something easy to understand as children’s illustrated books, to bring about more awareness on this tabooed subject, from the New York Times, that came with the papers today.
When Kate Messner read the testimonies of the gymnasts abused by Larry Nassar, she was struck my his behaviors early on: giving the girls little gifts and back rubs, or sending them private texts.
It got her thinking. “What if we could teach kids to recognize this and speak up, and tell us when someone made them uncomfortable?” she said. “And then, what if we really listened?”
The idea informed Messner’s latest novel, “Chirp”, about a young gymnast reckoning with the inappropriate behavior of an assistant coach during a summer at her grandmother’s cricket farm.
or this…
“There’s no explicit sexual assault in the story,” because it’s written for ten-to-fourteen-year-olds, she said. “It’s all what we would look at, what experts would look at, and say, “That’s somebody grooming a child.’”
“Chirp” is one of several middle-grade books—typically geared toward children from eight to twelve—published over the past year that address sexual consent, abuse and harassment, subjects previously considered off-limits for such young readers.
The writers were inspired by personal experiences with harassment or abuse, but the #MeToo movement added a sense of urgency to telling their stories.
“I had no plans to write anything about it any time soon a year and a half ago,” said Kimberly Brubaker Bradley, the author of “Fighting Words.” But reading the barrage of reports of sexual assault and harassment in the fall of 2018, she become angrier and angrier at how little had changed since her childhood, when she had experienced abuse.
“I just sort of had had enough,” she said. She wrote forty pages of the novel in one setting, and though she knew it was a taboo subject, she said she felt sure this was “the hill I was willing to die on.”
or this one…
Young adult books, geared toward teenagers, have long explored topics such as sexual violence, but middle-grade writers have largely steered clear because of resistant parents and publishers wary of scaring them off. Yet a range of research and data show that many children are exposed to sexual harassment or abuse.
In a 2016 study published in Children & Youth Services Review, a third of sixth graders and more than half of seventh graders reported having experienced some form of sexualized harassment most commonly in the form of lewd comments or jokes, with girls more likely to be on the receiving end than boys. According to the anti-sexual violence group RAINN, child protective services in the United States find evidence of or substantiate sexual abuse claims every nine minutes.
“We’re waiting until they’re in high school to have the conversations around harassment and sexualized mistreatment,” said Lisa Damour, an author and clinical psychologist who specializes in the experiences of teenage and young girls, but then, “the topic is three or four years old.”
So, this, is still, NOTHING new anywhere, children are being victimized too young, and because they lacked the words to tell us exactly what happened to them, that’s why, they’d, D-I-E-D, and some of the abusers of these young children or teenagers, are people in status of authorities, coaches, teachers, parents, which makes the children even less likely to speak up, and, the publications of these adult subject children’s books are, absolutely, necessary, it’s not exposing the children, but helping them find a way to tell their adult counterparts what’s happened to them, so the abuse CAN finally stop!