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SALT LAKE CITY — If you have kids, it might be the most important 30 minutes you spend on your computer. More and more Utah families are making a "Promise to Protect" their kids from child sex abuse.
Inside her family's home in Alpine, Utah, the reigning Mrs. Utah, Rachelle Rutherford, is chatting with her two youngest daughters. She asks, "What's the new thing you learned?"
Four-year-old Aubri is quick to answer, "My body, my rules."
Mom agrees, saying, "Yes, that's one of the important things that we've talked about."
There's been a lot of talk in the Rutherfords' home lately about the touchy subject of child sex abuse. Rachelle Rutherford was a victim of abuse as a young girl. But when she turned to a trusted adult for help, her family shunned her.
It was a painful and lonely period in Rutherford's life. "I had to, I guess, find my own way and I had to work through my own healing process over many years," she says.
KSL typically does not name victims of child sexual abuse. However, the Rutherford family openly talks about it as part of their work to bring attention to the issue and encourage more educational programs and training.
Part of Rutherford's journey to a place of healing has been her work to make sure teachers, kids and parents know how to spot and answer a call for help.
"Our first response always needs to be to listen to the child, to always report it and to take action," Rutherford says.
Gwen Knight is the School Services and Community Outreach Program administrator at Prevent Child Abuse Utah (PCAU). "We can't just keep burying our heads in the sand and not empower our children to know how to protect themselves," Knight says.
Rutherford has teamed up with Knight and others at PCAU to raise awareness of the agency's in-person and online programs, which stress education as the key to prevention.
So far, PCAU's report card is earning high grades for the agency's efforts. In Utah, 30,000 teachers and other school personnel and 60,000 students have trained in how to recognize, resist and report child sex abuse.
This school year, encouraged by PCAU's "Promise to Protect" program, hundreds more Utahns, many of them parents and community members who work with kids, are going online to learn more about this difficult topic.
Scott Rutherford, Rachelle's husband, goes online to show us how easy it is to find the PCAUtah.org page and the icon to click on to take the "Promise to Protect" course.
The couple completed the online training at home in about 30 minutes. And now they know what their kids have been learning about the topic at school.
Rachelle Rutherford says, "This is not sex education. It is having children receive age-appropriate training on what to do and then creating a safety plan."
It is a plan that empowers children to say "No, and stop," and finally to "go tell" three trusted adults what happened.
Eight-year-old Eva Rutherford says she "would tell Mom, Dad, a teacher or her older brother."
The Rutherfords' eldest son, Grant, was a victim of child sex abuse at age 5. It took him almost three years to reveal the incident to his parents, and they acted immediately to ensure his safety and work on his recovery.
"It's taken us several years of working with our son, and now he's able to talk about child sex abuse without shame, without fear, without worry because he knows it was not his fault," says Rachelle Rutherford.
It's never a child's fault, yet they will often suffer the long-term psychological effects of being a victim, including drug abuse and suicide. These are critical issues that the state of Utah spends upwards of $1 billion a year treating and working to prevent.
However, Knight says those aren't the costs they are most worried about at PCAU. "We're most concerned with the cost to the human spirit and the human soul of these young victims."
Earlier this week as part of the observation of National Child Abuse Prevention Month in Utah, 17-year-old Grant Rutherford was honored for being a young leader in the fight against child sex abuse.
Grant's senior thesis paper, titled "And There Was Light," focuses on life after abuse, why this is still such a challenging problem and the importance of education going forward.
