We Practice for Fires. Why Won't We Prepare for This?

Let me ask you something that I have never been able to shake.

Every school in this country runs fire drills. Children as young as three years old learn to stop what they are doing, line up quietly, and walk in an orderly line to the nearest exit. They practice it once a month. They practice it until it becomes instinct — until their little bodies know exactly what to do before their minds have even caught up.

The average child in America has never experienced a school fire. The probability that they ever will is extraordinarily small.

The probability that they will encounter sexual abuse before they turn eighteen is not small at all.

I want you to sit with that.

The Numbers We Are Not Talking About

According to the CDC, at least 1 in 4 girls and 1 in 20 boys experience child sexual abuse in the United States. That is not a fringe statistic. That is not a rare edge case that happens somewhere else, to someone else's family. That is a child in nearly every classroom in the country. That is very possibly a child you already love.

And yet — we gave them the fire drill. We couldn't give them this.

I wonder why that is. I wonder what we are so afraid of. Because the silence is not protecting our children. The silence is protecting the people who hurt them.

A child who has never been taught about body safety does not have the language for what is happening to them. They know something feels wrong. They feel ashamed. Confused. Scared. But they do not have the words. They do not have the framework. They do not know that what is happening to them has a name — that it is illegal, that it is not their fault, that there are adults who will believe them if they speak.

So they do not speak.

And the abuse continues.

And they grow up carrying it alone — the way so many of us have, the way so many people you love already are, quietly, without anyone knowing.

What Prepared Looks Like

I believe education changes everything. I have seen it. When children receive age-appropriate body safety education — when they learn early and clearly that their body belongs to them, that no adult should ever ask them to keep secrets about their body, that they can always tell a trusted adult no matter what — more children tell. More children are believed. More children get help. More abusers are stopped.

It is not a complicated equation. It is a simple one with a devastating gap: we have simply not been willing to have the conversation.

NOT GUILTY is willing. We are in classrooms, community centers, and homes — delivering the education that changes outcomes, one child at a time. But we cannot keep showing up without support.

Your donation to NOT GUILTY funds the body safety programs that schools are not providing. It funds the conversation that nobody else is having. It gives a child the words they need before they ever need to use them.

We run drills for fires. It is long past time we prepared our children for this.

Give today at www.notguiltyinc.givingfuel.com. Because fire preparedness matters — and so does this.

It is never the victim's fault. It never was.

Statistic source: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. About Child Sexual Abuse. cdc.gov/child-abuse-neglect