As of April 4, 2023, Ohio became the 38th state to enact “Erin’s Law.”
As a child, Erin Merryn was sexually abused.
Now, she travels across the country fighting for legislative and governmental protections to ensure that children in America are educated and empowered to recognize and disclose abuse. Erin’s Law requires K-12 schools to implement sexual abuse and violence education into their curriculum.
The successful passing of this bill in Ohio will go a long way toward providing Ohio’s children with evidence-based, age-appropriate information about what violence and abuse looks like, how to avoid it, and what to do when it happens.
The passing of Erin’s law in Ohio is long overdue. Children do not intuitively understand what sexual abuse is, how to avoid it, or what to do after it happens.
In fact, children are often reluctant to disclose abuse for various reasons including embarrassment, a desire to protect their abuser, lack of a support system outside the abuser, pressure from non-supportive family members, or concern about breaking up the family.
In fact, most abusers have connections to the child’s family or are family members and many parents do not support or believe a child’s disclosure when the perpetrator is someone upon whom the family relies (mom’s boyfriend; grandfather).
These factors predict disclosure delays, lack of disclosure, and even recantation (denial) of previous abuse disclosures.
Critically, if abuse education does not occur within schools, it is unlikely to happen at all.
Many parents never provide their children with any abuse-related education partly because they believe that abuse-related education is not important or that they worry it will frighten their child.
Yet, child sexual abuse remains pervasive: 1 in 5 girls and 1 in 20 boys experience child sexual abuse. Among parents who do discuss child sexual abuse with their children, they disproportionately emphasize “stranger danger.”
But in reality, most child sexual abuse is perpetrated by an acquaintance known to the family or a child’s family member.
Fortunately, recent research conducted by one of us (Margaret Stevenson) shows that child sexual abuse prevention education in schools will protect children.
Specifically, Stevenson collected data from 319 children (mean age = 10; 81% girls) who underwent a formal child forensic interview to investigate suspected child sexual abuse at a child advocacy center.
All of these children lived in a Midwestern area where the local child advocacy center administered developmentally appropriate child sexual abuse prevention education programming in many — but not all — of the local schools, providing a necessary control group.
Analyses revealed that the children who had received child sexual abuse prevention education were significantly more likely to disclose abuse during their forensic interview as compared to children who had not received the prevention education.
In turn, the child’s abuse disclosure significantly increased the likelihood that their abuse was substantiated in court. Of course, abuse substantiations usher in children’s access to necessary resources, support, and protection from the perpetrator.
Our own compelling evidence of the good that comes from child sexual abuse prevention education in schools has left us eager to see how Ohio – and how Knox County specifically – will roll out their abuse prevention education efforts in schools.
Fortunately, Knox County’s New Directions is leading this initiative – they already administer developmentally appropriate abuse prevention education programming in local high schools.
But most Knox County elementary schools — all but Danville Elementary, in fact — have not yet incorporated child sexual abuse prevention education into their curriculum. This is an unfortunate reality for Knox County elementary school children.
The median age of child sexual abuse nationally is 9 – so waiting until children are in high school is just too late for the education to do most of them any good.
The passing of Erin’s law now mandates that all schools – including elementary schools – incorporate child sexual abuse prevention education. Our research shows that this is good news for the children of Knox County and Ohio generally.
We encourage all Knox County elementary school administrators to incorporate the state-mandated child sexual abuse prevention education into their curriculum and to do so with urgency.
Jessica Besca,
Marissa Sun,
Margaret C. Stevenson,
Kenyon College