When social worker Cherie Benjoseph started hosting workshops in the ‘90s about child sexual abuse, many schools weren’t interested. “It doesn’t happen here,” they told her. But as a survivor herself, she knew that it was happening and that people needed to talk about it. “It was so taboo; it was so difficult for people to accept. It still is,” she says.
Originally from New York, Benjoseph started a family in Boston and moved to Florida in 1996 to be closer to extended family. She got involved with her children’s school PTA, and other moms were interested in her work and asked her to create a presentation about teaching, prevention and education of child sexual abuse. She created an eight-week program for preschoolers, and soon it spread—but not without pushback.
“It’s teaching children how to communicate, teaching children how to listen to their feelings, teaching children how to reach out to a trusted adult if they have a question or they’re confused by something,” she explains.
These Stay KidSafe! programs led to the formation of the KidSafe Foundation in 2009. The primary focus was on Palm Beach and Broward counties, but it has since expanded to online, allowing any kindergarten through fifth grade educator and social worker in the country to take the free workshops; 60,000 children and 50,000 adults have been empowered through Stay KidSafe!
Benjoseph then created Camp Safe, a workshop for those working with children in camp settings.
In the summer of 2023, 75 camps implemented the workshop with their staff, meaning 8,000 camp staffers across the country were trained. Benjoseph also partnered with the Youth Services Department in Palm Beach County for training.
In 2012, she co-wrote My Body is Special and Belongs to Me and has donated 25,000 copies. It is also available in Spanish and Haitian Creole. In 2022, the KidSafe Foundation merged with the Center for Child Counseling, giving it a larger platform and greater reach. Here, Benjoseph serves as the director of National Outreach and Education. She also serves on the board of the National Coalition to Prevent Child Sexual Abuse and Exploitation.
ABOUT DISCLOSURE: There are between 42 million and 65 million adults in the United States that are survivors of child sexual abuse. What do you think the average age of disclosure is for child sexual abuse? 52. Most people never tell, and most, if they do tell, they tell a really good friend, they tell their spouse, they tell their partner, and they’re telling it and they’re dealing with it after they’ve had their own children. The change in society is that we’re getting better at, hopefully, having disclosure happen earlier so the healing process can start earlier.
THE LINK BETWEEN ABUSE AND TRAFFICKING: The buzzword is human trafficking, but the reality is 70% to 90% of the kids who get trafficked already had a history of child sexual abuse in their youth. Many of them are thinking—it’s not correct thinking, but it’s how the child’s mind works and how the teen mind works—that now, they are in control of what’s going on. We all know that that’s not the case, and it’s tragic, but they feel like “I’m making the choice to do what I’m doing.” … Our goal is to prevent those kids from falling into that by preventing sexual abuse in the first place.
WHAT HAS CHANGED: Think about the latest things we’ve been reading about AI and the photos that are being created of children, et cetera. So we blink our eyes, and there’s a new added issue. But familial sexual abuse and neighborhood sexual abuse in communities, in churches and other places of worship—I’m sorry, but it’s been there forever. It’s not fixed—we still walk into a certain locale, and we still have to break down the barriers each and every time. We have a conversation, but we’re now allowed to get our foot in the door to have the conversation much more frequently than we used to. And that’s huge.
To learn more about child safety from Cherie Benjoseph, check out this exclusive Web Extra from the September/October 2024 issue of Boca magazine.
