The Enough Abuse Campaign

Child sexual abuse is "a silent epidemic," according to the American Medical Association. It's so widespread that each of us probably knows someone who is a victim or an offender, whether we realize it or not. It’s silent because most of us lack the knowledge and skills to detect and prevent it.

The Enough Abuse Campaign is a statewide effort to eliminate child sexual abuse in Massachusetts, and we are dedicated to obtaining and sharing the knowledge and skills necessary for prevention. The Campaign is for those who believe that we have had enough secrets, enough shame, enough hurt, enough confusion and enough denial that child sexual abuse is a serious epidemic. It is for those who are ready to say enough child sexual abuse and who are ready to work together to prevent it from happening in the future. In other words, the Enough Abuse Campaign is for all of us.

Enoughabuse.org also serves as the site of an exciting national prevention pilot funded by the Federal Centers for Disease and Control and Prevention (CDC) and operating in the Massachusetts communities of Gloucester, Newton and North Quabbin. If you live in one of these communities, go to the Get Connected section of this site for information about prevention activities in your area and how you can get involved.

Either way, join us in a show of hands against child sexual abuse.

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The Massachusetts Child Sexual Abuse Prevention Partnership (MCSAPP)

MCSAPP is a collaboration of 23 state-level public and private agencies that came together in the summer of 2002 to provide leadership to address the complex and challenging problem of child sexual abuse in our state.

That fall, after a national competitive process, Massachusetts was selected by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (the CDC) as one of three states in the country to pilot and evaluate new programs and strategies to prevent child sexual abuse. This is the first time our nation’s premier prevention agency has funded a prevention initiative on this issue.

Research conducted by the CDC and Kaiser Permanente, the nation’s largest HMO, had previously confirmed that child sexual abuse is one of a handful of key adverse childhood experiences that are linked to later high-risk health behaviors (substance abuse, overeating, tobacco use, to name a few) that in turn are linked to the most frequent causes of death in our country, including heart disease and cancer. It is clear that our country is spending billions of dollars each year to deal with the aftermath of child abuse - costs which are born by our health care system, our courts, law enforcement agencies, and our child protection and social services systems.

CDC and we believe that child sexual abuse is fundamentally a public health problem, that it can be prevented, and that criminal justice responses alone will never eliminate it. CDC leaders have described the efforts in the three selected states of Massachusetts, Georgia and Minnesota as “trailblazing”.

Here in Massachusetts, the Partnership is breaking new ground in two key ways:

1. We are emphasizing the need to hold adults and communities responsible for preventing child sexual abuse. Up until now, the most frequent community response to sexual abuse has been to implement child safety programs for young children.

   While these programs must be part of any comprehensive strategy to reduce abuse and while research confirms that such programs play a critical role in helping children disclose after abuse has happened, data does not show that this approach is preventing abuse from occurring in the first place. We are advocating for a broader, more comprehensive approach to prevention that encourages adults and communities to shoulder the responsibility for prevention.
   
   

2. Consistent with this effort to broaden our focus and prevent abuse from occurring in the first place, we are emphasizing the need to educate adults and communities about how to focus on possible warning signs in adults who interact with children, rather than focusing only on recognizing possible physical or behavioral signs in children after they have been abused.

   In this regard the Partnership is developing prevention messages and teaching tools aimed at: the general public; parents, other adults and professionals; and, importantly, at the family members and friends of potential perpetrators and active perpetrators. These messages will reflect the latest knowledge in the field and will educate these key groups not only about ways to recognize child sexual abuse, but also how to respond appropriately.