PROTECT THE GIFT: Keeping Children and Teenagers Safe by Gavin De Becker is a incredibly informative read about how to keep teens and parents safe and sane while navigating the world we live in. Below are my favorite excerpts from the book:

Much of the language in this book is gender-specific to men; I don’t always write he or she, his or hers, etc. That’s because men, at all ages and in all parts of the world, are more violent than women. My language may not always be politically correct, but when it comes to violence, it is statistically correct. 

 

Intuition sends many messengers to warn us, messengers such as doubt, suspicion, apprehension, and hesitation, but the most urgent- and often the most valuable- is fear.

 

Understand that nearly 90% of sexual abuse is committed by someone the children know, not by strangers.

 

The most common age at which sexual abuse begins is three. Nearly 100% of sexual abuse is committed by heterosexual males. The U.S. Department of Justice  estimates that on average, there is one child molester per square mile. The average child molester victimizes between 30-60 children before he is ever arrested. 

 

As a denier scuttles away from responsibility he often says, “Well, kids are resilient. When bad things happen, they bounce back”. 

 

Deniers, more than any other people, have it in their hands to protect our children and change our nation. Why? Because the solution to violence in America is not more laws, more guns, more police, or more prisons. The solution to violence is acceptance of reality. 

 

My impatience with denial is fueled by a career of asking people whose children were victimized if they could have seen it coming. Most of them say No, but then add a fact here, another there, until they must acknowledge, “Now that I think of it, I guess there were several signs”. 

 

Punishment for violence against children is less frequent than for the same violence against adults, and compensation for the wrongful death of a child is far less than for the wrongful death of an adult. In America, the safety of children gets less of the government’s attention than yours does. This is just another reminder that parents must be experts at protecting their children. 

 

(Author speaking about his childhood)– I recall my mother threatening to kill us kids by turning on a gas burner in our apartment while we slept. In response, Chrysti and I modified a screen on our bedroom window so we could get out if we had to. I put a box outside the window and conducted a drill, lifting 4yo Melissa down to test that I’d be able to get her out quickly. It was my job to be sure the whole family got through those years alive. We didn’t. My mother succeeded at her final suicide attempt when she was 39, and I was 16. 

Decades went by before I understood why I had invested my life in the prediction and prevention of violence-but now I’ve got the message. 

There aren’t many risks discussed in these pages that my sisters and i didn’t experience or just barely dodge. Chrysti died recently, but she was happy I was writing a book to help parents protect children. It’s good to know that even the hardest of our childhood experiences ended up being valuable, and I commit to share that value with you. I commit that by the end of this book, you’ll know more and be uncertain less; see more and deny less, accept more and hesitate less; act more and worry less. How can I be so sure? Because if nature selected you for the job of protecting a child, odds are you’re up to it. 

 

Intuition communicates with different people in different ways, sending any of the following messengers:

• Nagging feelings
• Persistent Thoughts
• Dark Humor
• Anxiety
• Curiosity
• Hunches
• Gut Feelings
• Doubt
• Hesitation
• Suspicion
• Apprehension
• Fear

 

Understand, however, that intuition about your children is always right in at least two ways: It is always based on something, and it always has your child’s best interest at heart. While some question the accuracy of intuition, nobody can doubt its intent, particularly when it comes to violence. 

 

The root of the word intuition, tueri, means to guard and to protect. 

 

Dr. Northrup says that the solar plexus, where we usually feel a gut reaction, is in fact a primitive brain. “It’s the part of our body that lets us know whether we are safe and whether we are being lied to”. 

 

When predicting violence, there are pre-incident indicators– my firm calls them PINS. When we know the sequence, they can be as telling as the yellow light. Some misfortunes in life come upon us without obvious pre-incident indicators, seemingly unavoidable, but this book is about those misfortunes we can avoid. 

 

There are 2 basic predatory types, the power-predator and the persuasion-predator. You’ll recall that after leaving the movie theater, a woman (Holly) was attacked by a criminal who used force in his attempt to control her. This describes a power-predator. The power-predator charges like a bear, unmistakably committing to his attack. He does so only when he feels certain he’ll prevail. 

Another woman (Jess) was taken by a persuasion-predator. This type of criminal looks for a vulnerable someone who will allow him to be in control. Observing Marilee and Jess, the man saw opposite vulnerabilities he could exploit. Jess was bored and wanted to be distracted; Mariless was busy and wanted not to be distracted. 

Like a shark circling potential prey, the persuasion-predator approaches slowly and watches to see how people react (if at all). He begins a dialogue and with each favorable response he elicits, this shark gets closer. He makes a small initial investment so that he can easily call off the game at any point. 

 

SURVIVAL SIGNALS

• Forced Teaming– using the word “we” (we’re in the same boat). An effective way to establish premature trust because a We’ve-got-something-in-common attitude is hard to rebuff without feeling rude. Sharing a predicament will understandably move people around social boundaries. It is not about coincidence; it is intentional and directed. It is one of the most sophisticated manipulations. Using “both of us”, “we’re some team”, “how are we going to handle this?”, “now we’ve done it”, and so on. The simple defense is to make a clear refusal to accept the concept of partnership: “I did not ask for your help and I do not want it. Please leave us alone”. 
•  
• Charm and Niceness

• Too many details

• Typecasting- trying to label someone: “You’re probably one of those overprotective parents”. Almost always involves a slight insult. It is the response itself that the typecaster seeks. So the defense is silence, acting as if the words weren’t even spoken. 

• Loan-Sharking

• The Unsolicited Promise

• Discounting the Word “No”

 

People seeking to control others almost always present the image of a nice person in the beginning. 

 

In our society, crimes against women have risen four times faster than the general crime rate. We need to consider where we park, where we walk, and whom we talk to in the context of whether someone will kill us or rape us or merely scare us half to death.

 

Whether or not men can relate to it or believe it or accept it, that is the way it is. Women, particularly in big cities, live with a constant wariness, their safety literally on the line in ways men don’t experience. Ask some man you know, “When is the last time you took a precaution for your own safety?” Most will not have an example in recent memory. Ask a woman the same question and most will say, “Last night”, “Today”, and even “Every day”. Ask women for examples: “I had a friend walk me to my car last night”; “I lock the door immediately when I get in the car”; “I always carry pepper spray”; “I drive instead of walk to the store”; “I carry my cell phone in my hand”, “I park in inconvenient spots if they are well lit”. 

 

A criminal who takes a child in public needs 3 elements: First, access to the child, such that the criminal is closer to your child than you are; second, he needs cover, even a brief moment when you or other adults cannot see what is happening; and third, he needs an escape. This might mean an easy way to get to his car or to a door or hallway that leads out of the public area. These 3 elements- Access, Cover, and Escape– can be expressed with the acronym ACE, and when someone with sinister intent has the ACE, it trumps all other cards. 

 

The Bureau of Justice Statistics reports that fully 15% of rape victims are younger than twelve. Who are the offenders in these crimes? Nearly 100% are heterosexual men. All of them have a process by which they gain access to and control of a child. We’ll call it the predation process. 

 

Chronic troublemakers are sometimes shifted to another school in the same district, a practice that is referred to by those of us who have grown cynical over the years as “the dance of the turkeys”. What was our problem becomes the problem of our colleagues across town. 

 

How would it be if teenage girls had some initial wariness about every man they encountered? It would be realistic- sad maybe, but realistic. Here’s why: Rapes and other sexual crimes are virtually always committed by men, and most rapes and sexual assaults happen to girls under 18 years of age. 

 

Understand that when a man in our culture says No, it’s usually the end of a discussion, but when a woman says No, it’s the beginning of a negotiation. This fact brings to mind a popular adage about persuasion: “The sale begins when the customer says No”.

 

Dangerous men are dangerous only if they can get you somewhere. They are not dangerous on the dance floor, in the restaurant, in the crowded mall. That may be where they meet you, but it’s not where they’d try to hurt you. 

 

Whatever the method, persuasion requires the participation of the target, and human beings are the creatures who most cooperate with their predators. By contrast, the lion has a more difficult predatory challenge than does the man who would rape a teenager. The lion, after all, must walk around in a lion suit; he is burdened by the obviousness of the very assets that give him power (claws, teeth, muscle). Hunting would be easy if the lion could look like a timid kitten when it served him. Man can. 

 

There are thousands of investigations into Rohypnol rapes each month, which means there are likley thousands more women who never figured out what happened to them, or if they did, chose not to report it. An obvious way to improve what is already epidemic in America (worst in Florida and Texas) is government classification of Rohypnol in the same category as drugs with a high potential for abuse, such as LSD and heroin. Hoffman-La Roche, the manufacturer of Rohypnol, resists reclassification and notes in their defense that “alcohol is the number one date rape drug in this country”. Okay, so Rohypnol is the number 2 date rape drug in the country- but it is still aiding thousands of predators to victimize girls and women. Men are more likely than women to sexually abuse children. 

 

Child abuse has been around a long time, but it’s only recently been considered a social problem. In 1874, some people trying to stop the abuse of a young girl named Mary Ellen Wilson turned to the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals because there was no where else to go. From Mary Ellen’s case emerged the first Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children. Because they removed children from their homes and placed them in child-care facilities, such organizations fell out of favor fairly quickly, and many disappeared entirely. 

It wasn’t until 1962, with the publication of Dr. C Henry Kempe’s article “The Battered Child Syndrome”, that child abuse as a social issue was officially reborn. The Saturday Evening Post said Kempe’s report of injuries done to children “read like a case book of a concentration camp doctor”. The nation was shocked and within a few years, every state in America passed laws designed to protect children. 

 

Children who kill their parents are far more rare in human nature than parents who kill their children. These young people are usually found to have been beaten, degraded, sodomized, tied up, or tortured in other ways. 

 

Either government has a duty to protect our most vulnerable citizens, or it has no business ever interfering with the sanctity of the family- we can’t have it both ways. Though most people agree that severely abused children should not remain with their tormentors, courts around the country have always been  reluctant to take children from biological parents- even in the most outrageous cases.

 

Another aspect of biological connection, or more accurately, the lack of it, brings me to the toughest issue in this book: stepfathers. Put simply, violent and abusive stepfathers are one hundred times more likely to kill a child than are biological fathers. Children are also at higher risk of sexual abuse by a stepfather. 

 

An amazing example from the animal world occurs in mice: When a pregnant female meets a new male, she loses her fetuses, Nature’s idea is that since this potential mate would kill the newborn anyway, it’s better to lose them in pregnancy and get on with production of babies more likely to survive. 

 

There are more step-relationships now than at any time in world history, and accordingly, more children are at risk. This means that parents must seek to know and evaluate the new spouses of their ex-wives and ex-husbands. I acknowledge without hesitation that millions of stepfathers are exceptional parents to their wives’ children. As just one example, I am forever grateful to my own stepfather Arthur Shurlock for the stability and kindness he brought into our otherwise chaotic family. We remain friends today, even though it’s been 30 years since he and my mother were divorced. 

 

Whether by husbands or boyfriends, intimate violence is the most predictable serious crime in America. It is directly relevant to protecting children because 75% of the homes where there is spousal violence also have violence toward the children. With a woman killed by a spouse or boyfriend every 2 hours in America, there was no shortage of cases for my office to study in developing this list of warning signs:

1. The woman has intuitive feelings that she is at risk. 
2. At the inception of the relationship, the man accelerated the pace, prematurely placing on the agenda such things as commitment, living together, and marriage.
3.  He resolves conflict with intimidation, bullying, and violence.
4.  He is verbally abusive.
5.  He uses threats and intimidation as instruments of control or abuse. This includes threats to harm physically, to defame, to embarrass, to restrict freedom, to disclose secrets, to cut off support, to abandon, and to commit suicide.
6.  He breaks or strikes things in anger. He uses symbolic violence (tearing wedding photo, marring a face in a photo, etc.)
7.  He has battered in prior relationships.
8.  He uses alcohol or drugs with adverse effects like memory loss, hostility, cruelty.
9.  He cites alcohol or drugs as an excuse or explanation for hostile or violent conduct (that was the booze talking, not me.)
10. His history includes police encounters for behavioral offenses like: threats, stalking, assault, and battery.
11. There has been more than one incident of violent behavior including vandalism, breaking things, throwing things.
12.  He uses money to control the activities, purchases, and behavior of his wife/partner.
13.  He becomes jealous of anyone or anything that takes her time away from the relationship; he keeps her on a “ tight leash”, requires her to account for her time.
14.  He refuses to accept rejection.
15.  He expects the relationship to go on forever, perhaps using phrases like “ together for life”, “ always”; “ no matter what”.
16. He projects extreme emotions onto others like hate, love, jealousy, commitment; even when there is no evidence that would lead a reasonable person to perceive them.
17.  He minimizes incidence of abuse.
18.  He spends a disproportionate amount of time talking about his wife/ partner and derives much of his identity from being her husband, lover, etc.
19.  He tries to enlist his wife’s friend’s or relatives in a campaign to keep or recover the relationship. 
20. He has inappropriately surveilled or followed his wife/partner.
21.  He believes others are out to get him. He believes that those around his wife/partner dislike him and encourage her to leave.
22.  He resists change and is described as inflexible, unwilling to compromise.
23.  He identifies with or compares himself to violent people in  film, new stories, fiction, or history. He characterizes the violence of others as justified.
24.  He suffers mood swings or is sullen, angry, or depressed.
25.  He consistently blames others for problems of his own making; he refuses to take responsibility for the results of his actions.
26.  He refers to weapons as instruments of power, control, or revenge.
27.  Weapons are a substantial part of his persona; he has a gun or he talks about, jokes about, reads about, or collects weapons.
28.  He uses male privilege as a justification for his conduct to “treat her like a servant”, make all the big decisions, acts like “the master of the house”.
29.  He experienced or witnessed violence as a child.
30.  His wife/partner fears he will injure or kill her or her children. She has discussed this with others or has made plans to be carried out in the event of her death like designating someone to care for the children.

 If a stepfather, add..

1.  He is jealous of his wife’s son(s), or jealous of his wife’s relationship with her son(s).
2.  He is combative, competitive, demeaning, abusive, or violent toward his wife’s son(s). 

 

If you know a woman with children whose relationship with her husband or boyfriend has many of these features on this list, you can help prevent escalated violence, and possibly murder. Literally. Refer the woman to a battered women’s shelter, if for nothing else than to speak to someone who knows about what she is facing. 

 

Violence is not hard-wired into boys. Aggression is hard-wired. Violence is taught. 

The absence of a father in a boy’s life is one of the predictors of future violence. David Blakenhorn, author of  Fatherless America, notes that 80% of the young men in juvenile detention facilities were raised without fully participating fathers. While I’ve directed much of this book toward mothers, it is fathers who can most favorably influence a boy’s behavior. Without fathers (or other men in the paternal role, such as stepfathers, grandfathers, mentors), too many boys learn from the media or from each other what scholars call “protest masculinity”, characterized by toughness and the use of force. That is not the only way to be a man, of course, but it’s the only way they know. 

 

(Story about a couple in Flint, Michigan)- Hudson and his wife Otelia lived in Flint, MI. Because they shared 11 children, some who knew them were doubtless surprised when Otelia filed for divorce, but awarded her custody of the kids as well. One cold evening in the winter of 1965, as Otelia prepared dinner for 8 of the children, Hudson walked into the house with a shotgun. His sons and daughters watched him shoot their mother to death as she lay screaming on the kitchen floor. Hudson surrendered to police and confessed to the killing, but a judge later reduced the charge to second-degree murder. Why did a killing that seemed so clearly premeditated get the lesser charge? Because one of Hudson’s boys testified that as he tried to get the shotgun away from his father, it had gone off accidentally. L.D.Hudson went to prison, but it wasn’t over. 20 years later, the sins of the father were visited on the son. Marlow Hudson, by then 37 years old, fired four shots into his girlfriends back, killing her. He was convicteed of first degree murder and sent to prison- but it still wasn’t over. 

Last year, Marlow’s younger brother, Larry, continued the family tradition. His wife Sheila has decided to get a divorce (like his mother had), so he killed her (like his father had). After  shooting her in the driveway of their Flint home, he dragged her body into the garage. He then fixed breakfast for the kids and went to work as usual. Sheila’s sister called the police because she felt something wasn’t right; they forced open the garage and found the body. Larry Hudson has now been sentenced to life in prison.

L.D. Hudson said at his trial that he didn’t mean to shoot his wife. Marlow Hudson has said he was “caught off guard and panicked’. Larry Hudson says he “just snapped”. Larry was a 14 year old boy when he saw that terrible scene in the kitchen and a 46 year old man when he delivered the same lesson to his own children. It may not be over yet. 

Hundreds of cases discussed here are why at the start of the book I said that the solution to violence in America is acceptance of reality. You now know enough about human beings to believe these things happen. All by itself, that makes you more able than most to see the warning signs, and that ability makes you a better neighbor to some child. 

 

To get your copy of this incredibly informative book, click HERE. 

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