Training FAQs

We believe that any organization who works with children or has children as one of their primary audiences should provide sexual abuse prevention training to their staff. This includes not just places like schools and daycares and summer camps, but places like museums, theaters and libraries or organizations that work with teaching artists. This is valuable information for professionals and future professionals in child-serving or human services fields such as social work, child psychology, early childhood education, and counseling. Many child-serving professions have a legal obligation and are mandated to report suspected abuse, and it’s helpful that your staff understand their responsibilities as mandated reporters when it comes to sexual abuse.

ChicagoCAC offers trainings for parents and caregivers as well as professionals. If your organization works with parents and caregivers of young children, consider providing education sessions that helps parents identify signs of abuse, learn how to respond to and report abuse, and develop the skills to educate their family about staying safe. This education can complement other trainings about parenting skills you may already offer or can focus on specific topics like keeping children safe online.

Our trainings are also important for college students in social services or child-serving disciplines. Some degree programs vary in how much they cover this content, and the earlier this fundamental knowledge is introduced in someone’s career, the better. In particular, learning about how children’s advocacy centers handle sexual abuse investigations can give students a greater understanding of trauma-informed practices and even inspire them to work in the field.

DCFS’s Mandated Reporter training is very helpful, but it doesn’t specifically focus on sexual abuse and is mostly geared towards response rather than prevention. In addition, the DCFS training platform is not a place where you can ask questions about situations that might occur or get feedback from a trainer or colleagues, which can be beneficial to the learning experience. ChicagoCAC has often heard from the professionals we train that the online DCFS training doesn’t feel like enough to help their staff learn how to address child sexual abuse, and that our training provides an added level of confidence around the issue. It’s also helpful to periodically refresh people’s knowledge on mandated reporting, and currently DCFS only requires this training to be renewed every three years.

ChicagoCAC is happy to work with your organization to customize trainings for your workplace, including offering scenarios that you often experience in your everyday interactions with children and families at your organization. We aim to create a culture of safety and prevention at youth-serving organizations by sharing prevention best practices as well as modeling safe behaviors and proper responses.

With over 20 years of responding to reports of child sexual abuse in the city of Chicago, and nearly a decade of offering prevention education training, ChicagoCAC has vital expertise to share when it comes to sexual abuse prevention. While a variety of programs exist to learn about child sexual abuse and become a facilitator of these trainings, many HR departments focus on issues relevant to adults in the workplace. ChicagoCAC can fill in the knowledge gap around sexual abuse prevention, and our direct experience is an asset that few can match.  

At ChicagoCAC, we believe that adults are responsible for keeping children safe – and we’re not alone. The well-respected national sexual abuse prevention organization Darkness to Light also recommends that adults be the ones who take responsibility for abuse prevention. Adults are often more aware of what behaviors are concerning and inappropriate than a child might be and can intervene in situations where those behaviors are present. And, most importantly, we believe a child should never feel responsible for preventing their own abuse, as that can compound feelings of guilt and shame they might have if they experience abuse, regardless of whether they received prevention education. When a child discloses sexual abuse, they are often disclosing that someone they love or trust has hurt them, which makes disclosure even more difficult. That’s why we feel strongly that it’s an adult’s job to follow up with both children and adults when they see behaviors that might indicate abuse is occurring.

Our education sessions empower parents and caregivers with the language they need to have prevention-focused conversations with their children and involve the whole family in keeping children safe. We know that some parents feel more comfortable speaking with their children about topics like abuse prevention than leaving those conversations to someone else. Having conversations about boundaries and consent with your children is a good way to strengthen your relationship with them and strong relationships can help prevent children from experiencing abuse.

Almost all our training participants walk away with more knowledge than they had before – even if it’s just what behaviors that might be concerning in adults and children or how to report abuse. After one of our sessions, over 90% of our training participants feel more confident and comfortable addressing issues related to child sexual abuse and feel more able to act on what they’ve learned.

It’s hard to know the effects of education that is supposed to prevent an outcome – especially when the outcome is something that’s very hard for people to talk about and often goes unreported. But the knowledge our trainings provide can make people feel more empowered to speak up on behalf of children and take steps to protect them. That’s exactly what we want – to stop abuse before it starts. We hope your organization will realize the benefits of this education and will do everything in its power to keep the children it serves safe.