04/06/2026
Here's Executive Director Meg Bossong's column on awareness months and the interdisciplinary nature of our work:
April represents two big awareness months for our work: Sexual Assault Awareness Month and Child Abuse Prevention Month. I will admit that in the early days of my career, I looked at awareness months with some disdain. I’ll further admit that much of that disdain flowed from the self-righteousness that we all have in such abundance when we’re 25 and new in a field. And…there was some truth at the core. Our work is year-round (and in some settings, around the clock), and that focusing attention for a month lends the impression that there’s seasonality and that The Work™ is confined to the more visible public awareness events like Clothesline Projects, Take Back the Night, and teal ribbon or denim days.
But I’ve been thinking a lot this year about how these two intersecting awareness months highlight how essential it is that we are interdisciplinary in our work, in our professional relationships, and in our advocacy.
In our March Lunch & Learn, Drs. Melissa Grady and Jamie Yoder were talking at a granular level about how we establish the evidence base behind evidence-based practices. Various studies suggest that a) young people with PSB are more likely than the average young person to have a trauma history and b) the incidence of PSB is probably peaking around ages 13-15 – thus that there should be lots of treatment provider/adolescent dyads to recruit for an intervention study of TF-CBT/PSB. However, Dr. Grady highlighted a really interesting challenge: very few providers had clients in that age range for the study, and she raised the question, “Where are these kids?”
Where they are is often in the liminal spaces–the hallways–of our systems. In many states, they’re over the age of criminal responsibility, and thus treated differently by their juvenile justice systems than younger children, which shapes where, when, and by whom they’re offered services. In schools, they’re often in middle or high school, and much more likely to be met with exclusionary discipline and Title IX processes, rather than behavioral interventions. In families, it’s the age when they’re craving and demanding more privacy, autonomy, and time with peers, and much of the behavior may go unnoticed by the adults in their lives until it’s grown in frequency or severity.
We have to relentlessly link these two awareness months, because we cannot ever get to a world without sexual assault if we can’t get to a world without child abuse. The harm that teens and young adults do to their peers is stitched tightly to all the ways that harm happens to much younger children, and that cycle keeps feeding itself until we break it. Everyone who is part of this community of practice works at that daily, and our call this month is to keep reaching out to each other.
We need our parent educators and outreach workers in family resource centers. We need our colleagues supporting families in schools, child protection systems, and healthcare. We need our early childhood educators just as we need our college campus prevention staff. We need our clergy, and we need the savviest of our social media content makers, our juvenile probation officers and our youth program staff. We need affordable childcare options and we need consent education. We need child safeguarding policies, and we need behavioral healthcare coverage that makes access to care affordable while providing a living wage to the professionals who provide that care.
Our focus in awareness months matters because sometimes it is the first time that someone has a moment to hear their story reflected or their need for hope affirmed. And it matters because it reminds us that we’re not alone in our work the other 11 months of the year.
