Dear Friend of Children:

As another year is ending, we reflect back on what MassKids has been able to accomplish in 2022 thanks in part to the support of concerned citizens like you. As you may be aware, 1 in 10 children experience sexual abuse, which can have lifelong negative physical and mental health consequences. 90% of the perpetrators are people known to the child, such as school employees or even family members.

Recently, 41 former students of a Peabody school gym teacher and coach filed a lawsuit accusing him of sexual abuse over a period of 27 years. As this and other cases in schools in Massachusetts and across the country show, abuse like this could have been prevented if school staff were trained to recognize sexual misconduct and abuse, and the school had a comprehensive abuse prevention policy.

That is why through our Enough Abuse Campaign, we continue to work to prevent child sexual abuse through online trainings of school and youth organization employees, webinars to educate professionals about child sexual abuse prevention, and technical assistance to schools to improve their prevention policies. We also work to pass crucial prevention legislation on Beacon Hill.

We hope you will consider supporting MassKids and the Enough Abuse Campaign as we continue our cutting-edge work to keep more children safe from the devastating effects of child sexual abuse. Here are a only few highlights of our work this past year:

• Over 15,000 school employees in 150 schools have now completed “Enough! Preventing Child Sexual Abuse in My School,” our evidence-based, online training. Evaluations remain strong. As one 30-year veteran teacher in Lowell stated: “This is one of, if not THE best, trainings I have ever experienced.”
• We developed a Code of Conduct Policy Guide for schools to ensure their employees are aware of and avoid boundary-violating behaviors that could lead to inappropriate sexual behaviors with students. A leading expert on educator sexual misconduct has called the tool “overwhelmingly complete, needed, appropriate…a breakthrough piece of work.”
• We launched the “Safety STARS” initiative to provide schools and youth organizations with expert technical assistance and resources to implement policies to prevent child sexual abuse.
• We launched the Enough Abuse Campaign in Lynn, Lowell and Medford where we are actively working with elected officials and community leaders to educate citizens and professionals about how to keep children safe from sexual abuse.
• We developed and held bi-monthly meetings of the States Policy Exchange, a virtual networking and peer support resource for policymakers and advocates working to pass child sexual abuse prevention legislation in their states.
• We presented “Movement Building to Prevent Child Sexual Abuse in the U.S. and Globally,” at the Children’s Rights in the U.S. Conference convened by Salem State University, Center for Childhood and Youth Studies.
• We presented a 90-minute training “Child Sexual Abuse as a Public Health Emergency: Strategies Being Implemented to Prevent It,” for Boston Children’s Hospital staff, sponsored by Boston Children’s Hospital Child Protection Program.
• We have significantly updated www.enoughabuse.org to better support the thousands of people who visit our site every month for information and resources.

At MassKids, every dollar raised is spent strategically to take our prevention programs and policies to more communities. Your support will result in tangible outcomes and help us reach our goals faster and for more children.