Protecting Children: Holiday Gathering Safety Tips #shorts

One is I want to talk about family gatherings because as we know um it's really common that most child sexual abuse is perpetrated by somebody the child knows, often a family member or close family friend. I want to also highlight hotels. And I also want to spend a few minutes talking about the importance of understanding survivors' position when they are either at a seder or with us for Yom Tov. Certain things that can be triggering, you know, and things that we should tell people to keep in mind. So, it's very important that children, especially in our community, we have this um I don't even know the right way to describe this word. But basically, there's this bubble, the frum bubble. Everybody looks the same, everybody acts the same. We're all there, we're all here together, everybody knows each other, and by definition, we let our guard down. That's just a reality. We do it as adults, also, right? When we're we're in a familiar place, then at the end of the day, that's something that happens. So, if we do that as adults, we can only imagine, you know, what children do. Now, also, we have to remember that these are atmospheres of fun, celebration, enjoyment. You know, a lot of hugging, a lot of people not seeing each other for a while. Um there's a lot of rooms in people's houses, bedrooms, basements, attics. Um you know, things of that nature. These are all things, you know, during the seder, people, you know, are having these long sederum where they think it's important, you know, and and for some people it is, for some people it would ADHD will kill them, but either which way, for children it could be very detrimental and you're going hours and hours long of no supervision. Yeah, I think definitely we have to recognize that when we're all together in a house, it sometimes can be a couple of houses in in the neighborhood, which means you can have some children's, you know, then the seder's going really late and you can have some children a few doors down in a totally separate house without any supervision, really. It could be just a couple of young teenagers or preteens, something that we normally would not allow, just like during the year in terms of a sleepover with zero adult supervision, and all of a sudden, the Pesach seder night is just automatically kind of makes it a time for that. And we have to be thinking to ourselves, is that really something that we are okay with when we're preparing and planning with beforehand, now, and these next couple of weeks are the times to have these conversations and to think, okay, where are the kids going to be if it's 1 a.m. and we still have an hour to go and they're tired and they want to go back, where are they going back to?