Very Quick UPdate

I can’t believe I haven’t written anything on this blog since the election. I guess I needed that time to recover 🙂

In all seriousness though I have been pretty busy volunteering in a vast array of capacities. I have reviewed lots of tech and social work related proposals and a couple manuscripts. This in addition to my regular academic work is doing a great job of keeping me up at night. Lately, I have been still plugging away on a couple social media related research projects. However, I am slowly trying to move beyond into an area where I have mainly operated as a consultant. I, along with a colleague, conduct a program evaluation for a child sexual abuse prevention play and it is awesome. The play is called Hugs & Kisses and is performed by the Virginia Repertory Theatre out of Richmond, Virginia. The play uses child appropriate language to teach children in grades kindergarten through fifth the concepts of good touch, bad touch, and secret touch. You can check out this short clip for more information and also their website https://va-rep.org/tour/hugs.html.

This play is really amazing and kids absolutely love it. It has been very effective at teaching these important concepts. But where do I come in for all of this besides performing the annual evaluation? Well, my colleague and I are trying to do some more research around the language used in childhood sexual abuse prevention. The literature is surprisingly scant on this topic and anecdotally I have heard that even in abuse investigations some social workers do not adequately investigate for sexual abuse. We wonder if educating children can help with prevention. Well, the obvious answer is yes because an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. But! We want to know more so we can help create better interventions and take prevention even further.

If you are a social worker, educator, counselor, or helping professional I would be interested to hear your opinion on the topic of childhood sex abuse prevention. Leave a comment or send me an email. I look forward to the conversation and I will try to post some more regular updates here about my on-going work.