Ep #70: Preventing Abuse: How to Empower and Be Advocates for Our Children with Rachelle Rutherford

What is the correct way to talk to young children about sexual abuse in order to help prevent them from being victims of that? It’s a difficult topic, but it’s something that’s very important because it is happening way too often to a child that you might love. Today, my guest Rachelle Rutherford not only experienced this as a child herself but has also had her own children that she’s so protective of, experience things and has been on the Board of Directors for Prevent Child Abuse Utah for 15 years now.

She is the current Mrs. World America and Mrs. World America Fitness. And we had a very candid conversation about this, how to help children learn the dialog, how to help them find the words to be able to speak to you, how to make it something comfortable, how to remove the shame from it. So that if something happens, first of all, they have their rules, their boundaries, they have the phrases to say. And then also how to come and talk to you.

It was a really important conversation, I learned some things, I think you will too. I hope that you find it really helpful. And then she also guides you to some resources where you can get more information specifically based on the age of your child. The conversation is coming up right after this.

Welcome to the Raising Healthy Kid Brains podcast where moms and teachers come to learn all about kids’ brains, how they work, how they learn, how they grow and simple tips and tricks for raising the most resilient, kind, smart, compassionate kids we can. All while having lots of grace and compassion for ourselves because you know what? We all really need and deserve that too. I am your host, Amy Nielson. Let’s get ready to start the show.

Amy: Rachelle, welcome to the show. I’m so happy to have you on today.

Rachelle: Thank you. So great to be here.

Amy: This is so amazing. And Rachelle was introduced to me by my friend, Faith, and I’m just so excited. Tell me a little bit about you and why you’re here and how you got to where you are today.

Rachelle: Yeah. So, my name’s Rachelle Rutherford and I am a mom of six kids. And I’ve been married for 29 years, which is an amazing amount of time with my soul mate, Scott. And we live in Utah County. And I am currently the CEO for Kids on the Move. Kids on the Move is based out of Orem, Utah. And we work with children with disabilities and delays. And we serve over 3,000 children every single year and support those children and their families and help them to reach the highest potential that they can reach.

And sometimes it’s just to fill that gap of those milestones and other times it’s more intensive therapy and for a longer period of time. And so I love what I do. Kids on the Move has been around for 40 years. I am also currently Mrs. World America and Mrs. World America Fitness 23/2024. And that’s a really exciting time for me. That’s something that I’ve personally worked towards for many years because I have a cause that I’m really passionate about.

My platform is actually defend innocence, the prevention of child sexual abuse and all forms of abuse. And I currently sit on the Board of Directors for Prevent Child Abuse Utah for the last 12 years.

Amy: That is amazing. Oh, my goodness. And you have six children, so that’s a lot of things that you’re doing and just incredible and wow.

Rachelle: Thank you. Thank you. It’s busy for sure.

Amy: I love it. And there’s so many pieces of what you do that I find so interesting. Your Kids on the Move, what a neat thing to be a part of. But I think today we want to talk a little bit about preventing abuse in children. And I just think this is a really interesting topic because I think sometimes just helping make it more of a conversation for children. So knowing how to talk to a young child about it in a way that’s age appropriate so that they have words to use to use back with us, if something is happening that they’re uncomfortable with.

And so it’s just something they feel like they can talk to us about. So I wanted to get into this and just kind of find out about some of the work you do there. And what tips you have for our moms or teachers of young children and what that could look like and how we empower children to use their voices and to communicate or help us know what’s going on.

Rachelle: Yeah, absolutely. And I’ll first just share that I’m a survivor of child sexual abuse. And as a young teenager, I learned that my sister was also being abused. And so I spoke out at 16. And with that experience, I was actually disowned and abandoned by my parents because the abuse was happening in our home. And so as a young teenager, I found that I was homeless at 16 and that experience just completely rocked my world. And because I think that fundamental component of trust between a child and the parent was broken.

And it’s so important and so critical that if any child ever comes to an adult or to you as a parent and discloses abuse, that you support the child. Even if it sounds something like, how could this possibly happen? We need to listen to children. And that’s just so critical. So the first thing I would just say is as adults, as the advocates for children, believe them. If they come to us and they share this information in Utah, we have a duty to report. And if we don’t report, we can actually be charged with a misdemeanor for not reporting as an adult.

So that’s an important thing that we need to just know, that we have a responsibility as parents and as adults. And so I think that’s first and foremost. But that experience, I think that was a turning point in my life where I felt like speaking up, I lost every person that I loved. That was the consequence for speaking up and sharing something that the people that were close to me didn’t want to talk about. And so over time, I had to kind of expand and grow through that experience.

And it took me 26 years to speak of that experience again because of just the traumatic experience of not being heard. And I never told another person. And I didn’t because when you go to your mother to share something like that and you see that type of a response, then you’re like, “What is my friend’s mom going to think? What would my coach think or what would a teacher think if my own mother responded in such a way?” So I think it’s always important to believe. But with that, I made a decision that I wanted to be an advocate for children.

I wanted to help in our state so that I could make that topic a little bit easier to talk about and a little bit more comfortable for people to discuss. And so at Prevent Child Abuse Utah, we actually have an education program that’s available for elementary schools. It’s been approved by the Utah State School Board. And they’ve approved the curriculum. And I love it because it’s so appropriate for children.

So the first thing just to know is that if that training is conducted at your child’s elementary school and they’re a public school, then what they’re going to do is they’re going to teach your children with age appropriate language to recognize your oh, oh feeling. Say no. And go tell five trusted adults. Now, it used to be a go tell three trusted adults, but what we found is it usually takes a child a minimum of telling three before one of those adults actually does something about it.

So they’ve changed it up from three to five because they’re like, “Hey, if I tell five trusted adults then there’s a level of certainty that somebody is going to come forward and support that child.” Where before at three and learning later, after looking at data, there is a chance, they had to tell absolutely three people and it took three people before someone took action. So that’s why we’ve changed it to five. But we talk about in the trainings, all forms of abuse.

And with child sexual abuse, we just talk about the area that is covered by your one piece swimsuit. So we’ll just show a picture of a child and they’re in a one piece swimsuit or a little boy that’s in swimsuit trunks. And so we just say that no one should touch you where your swimsuit covers your body. And then we talk about the difference between a good secret and a bad secret. A secret that makes you happy like a surprise party or a secret that makes you feel sad or scared. And helping children kind of decipher between those feelings.

Now, I would absolutely say it’s always the adults’ responsibility to educate and to be the protectors of children. But children need the vocabulary and they need the words to be able to describe what’s happening. And so I think the first line of defense is, they always encourage you to use appropriate language in describing body parts. And the reason that that’s important, so when you’re as a parent, they don’t do that in the schools because we feel like that should be something that a parent educates their own child.

But if you use the proper words to describe your anatomy, then if you have a conversation, “Someone touched my private parts.” “Well, where exactly did they touch?” And they can actually specify those names and that proper terminology. Then you know exactly and they can describe exactly how they were touched inappropriately. And so I think that’s the first thing, from little, little call your body parts, the appropriate parts.

Amy: Do you think that kind of, also I love that you talk about good secrets and bad secrets. And just kind of trying to take away their shame because I feel like there’s shame. And sometimes I feel I’ve worked with children before that are like, “The bad parts of my body. We shouldn’t be letting anyone show or touch the bad parts of my body.” I’m like, “What? There are no bad parts of your body.” But I think sometimes even using that language kind of takes away the shame that maybe children somehow are led to feel around the different body parts.

And so using language and terminology, I feel almost opens that up, maybe too, a little bit as well as giving them language to describe what’s happening, yeah.

Rachelle: Absolutely. And it normalizes it in your home too. It’s not a bad word to say that, so they’re not going to feel like if they said that to you or told you as a parent, “Hey, someone touched me here.” I’ve heard that word in our home. It’s not like I’m saying a swear word or a bad word. It’s this is something that we do to describe. Just like you might see in some families, I have three girls and I have three boys. And my daughters speak really openly about their periods and they’re just like, “I’m on my period.”

My 11 year old son, I’m having to kind of describe a little bit more to him because they’ve just normalized that. And my teenage older boys, they tease my daughters and just normal, just like, “Oh, that’s got to be rough.” I mean, so we just normalize it so it’s not a big deal. And really embrace the awkward, embrace it from a very young age so that it should never be that, even the conversation around sex in general should never be you wait till they’re 12 or 15 and then it’s this awkward, weird conversation.

If you’re having little micro conversations as they grow, talking about their body or talking about the way that their body’s changing or they’re hitting puberty or whatever those things are. It’s just going to normalize. It’s going to make it really comfortable. I just had my daughter for the first time, she just told me last night. She’s like, “Mom, so I just had my first kiss.” And she’s 15½, almost 16. And she’s like, “I didn’t know how quite to say it.” So she’s like, “I just said it.” And again, it was just this happy moment. And I was just excited for her and asked her all about it.

But it wasn’t a bad thing. It was just something, this is just another step in our development. Another really great thing that you can teach young children is, my body, my rules. We talk about in our training too, who owns your body? Does your mom on your body, your dad on your body? Does your doctor or anyone else? No. I’m responsible for my body. So my body, my rules. That means you get to decide who you hug, who you don’t hug, who you decide to high five instead of not high fiving. You get to decide if someone helps you or hugs you.

And that’s come up in our household where my younger children, when they were probably a four year old and a six year old and my little boy would hug his sister. And she would turn around, “My body, my rules don’t touch my body.” And that was her way of expressing it. But it’s something we talked about in our home all the time where they could say, “Hey, I’m saying no. I’m setting a boundary here because I don’t like you doing that.” And it’s harmful, every little brother or bigger brother does it, nags their sibling.

But they get to practice that at a really young age. And what a healthy thing to be like, “No, my body, my rules. I’m in charge.” And I think that’s important, just as they move forward and getting older or they start dating or whatnot. If they know that they get to decide and have full ownership of their body, then they are comfortable setting boundaries early.

Amy: I love that. And I think this is the thing that I feel I didn’t know earlier on. I have five children and my oldest ones are graduating and leaving home. But with my younger ones, I feel I even got better at this, at being more careful around would you like a hug? Would a hug be helpful? I’d love to give you a hug, would you like one? Would that be helpful right now? And giving them ownership, the ability to say no. And I have one daughter who, when she’s upset, she doesn’t want a hug and so she can say, “No, I don’t want a hug right now.”

And I can say, “Okay, well, I’m here with you. I’m still with you. But I’m not going to hug you unless you want one.” Anyway, so I feel I love that idea of starting to give them the practice of being able to say no, giving them the opportunity to say no. And I love the phrase too, “My body, my rules.” Because it’s just something that’s so easy to remember for a four year old or even at a young age. So I love that idea and helping build that as they grow. So that’s fantastic.

Rachelle: Yeah, absolutely. And it translates in many different ways and scenarios. I’ll share an experience that my son had. He was in first grade and he learned my body, my rules. And one thing that happened in his school was he would be in the bathroom stall and one of the kids would just kind of poke their head under the stall. And so of course, when you’re using the restroom and maybe just kind of kicked him a little bit or just be like, “Hey, knock it off.” But I guess it happened enough times and it happened to other students and it really bothered my son.

And so he, knowing I’m supposed to tell five people. And again, this isn’t a really crazy thing that someone was really trying to be hurtful, but it was, here’s my boundary. This is what I think is okay. I’m recognizing, I’m uncomfortable with this. I don’t like it. And I’m going to go tell five people. So he first went to his teacher and told his teacher, “Hey, this child in my classroom keeps going under the stalls.” And she may have talked to him and pulled him aside and took action, what she thought was like, “Hey, we need to knock that off. We don’t do that” or whatnot.

But it continued to happen so he told the teacher a second time. And it continued to happen. So then he goes and he tells me, his mom, so he knows I’m going to a second person because I’m not getting the resolution, the help that I need. And so he shares this with me. So I in turn called the teacher. I called the teacher to talk to her. And she explains that they have talked. And then I proceed to go call the other mom. So I decided I’m going to go call the other mom because the school wasn’t really communicating that.

But I thought if it was me, if it was my child that was doing that, I would probably want to know so I could have some more conversations with my son. Also that child could potentially be at risk if they’re in a public restroom. What if there were older men or even middle-aged men just in the next all over and there was a child that was doing that and they potentially had a possibility to harm that child for whatever reason? Not every stranger is like that, obviously. But if there was someone that had those tendencies, that could potentially indicate here’s a vulnerable child.

So I reached out to the mom and I was really kind. I just said, “Hey, this is what’s happened. I don’t know if you’re aware of this. But my son really likes your son as a friend and this is causing a strain on their relationship and it’s happening with other children. And if I was the mom, I’d want to know so I could have those conversations at home.” And she was super grateful. She thanked me and we proceeded to invite her son over the next week just to show, hey, there’s no hard feelings here. We’re just trying to have a resolution.

But what I learned was, this young man was adopted. He’s the only boy in their family. And she’s like, “We have one restroom, they close the door. So I never see that behavior at home.” And then they’re like, “We send him in the restroom on his own or he goes with his dad. So I don’t see that in a public setting as his mom.” And then also this child has autism. So he wasn’t picking up on some of the social cues that his friends were saying, “Hey, this is bothering me. I don’t like this.” And kind of registering what that meant.

And she was just so grateful that I would have just a direct, candid, yet friendly and loving conversation with her about her son. And also to be concerned about his well-being, I want her to correct that when working with her son so that he’s never vulnerable to anything happening to him as well. So it’s not, again, there’s no shaming with it. It’s just, I noticed a behavior that could put him at risk, it puts other children at risk, too. And this is the best time to address it. He’s in first grade. He’s six years old, let’s talk about it now while they’re young.

Amy: Yes, for sure.

Rachelle: And so that’s just an example of, I think when children have that confidence of this is my body, this is my rules, I can have boundaries, then they can speak up and say something.

Amy: Yeah. I love that. And the telling five adults, that feels like a lot maybe. I feel like it’s a lot. I’m thinking, I don’t know, I had an experience as a child too with being abused and didn’t tell for a long time because I feel like there is so much shame in it. And when I did finally tell someone, it wasn’t a parent. But thankfully that person went and talked to parents and some things were changed, which was good. But it is so hard to tell.

And so I don’t know, do you have suggestions around how to make it easier for children? I mean, we’re giving them language which I think is really good. I think having clear boundaries, talking about the swimsuit, no one’s supposed to touch you. I feel like that’s really healthy. And telling five adults. and maybe that’s just something you build up as they’re young, and that just feels like this is what you do. And so you tell five people and do you have any suggestions for how to encourage them to tell five different people?

Rachelle: Yeah. So in the school with the training is what they do is they actually have the children write down their five people. So you can give them ideas of, okay, I’ve taught in a classroom and I’ve said, “Who would you tell?” And the kids were raising their hands. And they’re like, “I would tell my older brother or I would tell”, some of them said, “My teachers, I would go tell”, maybe it’s an ecclesiastical person that they feel would be a safe person, a doctor or maybe it’s an uncle.

So going through and then as a parent that gives you an opportunity, who would they go tell and are those trusted people in my circle of trust as well? So I think just sitting down with them and helping them identify that list is really helpful. I would also say that you have to have repeat conversations. And the reason repeat conversations is important, because even though I have spoken to my kids a lot about it, I’ve even actually had my children attend the trainings that Prevent Child Abuse Utah does.

But still, one day I was driving down the road with my daughter. She was eight years old. She’s just sitting in the front passenger seat. And we weren’t talking about this at all. And one day, just she turns to me, she says, “Mom, what’s sexual abuse?” And I said, “Well, what do you think it is?” And knowing I’ve had this conversation lots of times but I was like, “What do you think it is?” And she’s like, “Is that when someone physically hurts you, punches you or kicks you?” And I was like, “Well, it does hurt you.” And we had to go through that explanation.

But what I thought was cool was that at some point, it clicked for her, where she felt like she could ask the question and get more clarity. And I don’t know why she was thinking about it. Maybe someone had tripped her at school or done something where she was like, I want to make sure this isn’t something I’m supposed to be telling about or not. So I think the repetitiveness of this is important.

I will share a story of my own child. So obviously as a survivor, that’s something I never wanted to have happen with one of my children. And I think it’s a reason why I’m even more advocating for children and for parents to have those conversations. Even the most protective parents, bad things can still happen, and difficult things can still happen. And so in our household, we’ve never done sleepovers. We don’t have our children sleep at other people’s houses, not even family members. And we’re kind of a little bit more extreme that way where we just haven’t even allowed if for family members.

And for some people that might seem a little outrageous but for our dynamics that seemed like the right thing for our family. But our son, we had talked about child sexual abuse. And at eight years old, we went as a family, we had a little outing that we went to Dairy Queen to get ice-cream. And there was a man there that was disabled and mentally disabled as well. And this cute man, he just kind of squeezed into our booth with our kids and he was holding his little blankie. And my children were like, “Well, I don’t quite know what to do. Who’s this person?”

And so when that experience happened and then he quickly moved on with the people that were caring for him. But I had this conversation with them of kind of what life is like for someone with a disability. And that sometimes, if there’s a mental disability, they don’t always know that what they’re doing might be scary for someone else and that they’re just, and in a way I kind of described them as just angels that have been sent here to Earth and they got a fast pass back to heaven. I guess it’s the way that I kind of described it.

And I kind of made a little joke with my son and I just said, “But for you and I, we don’t have a fast pass.” So I said, “We’re not off the hook. We actually have to be accountable for our decisions and make good decisions.” That was kind of my little joke for my son. And all of a sudden he was just like, “I need to tell you something because I’m not a good boy.” And I was like, “Whoa.” Again totally out of the blue, not even thinking anything there. And so we get home and he’s like, “I have something I need to tell you.”

And this sweet young boy, sorry, it makes me emotional because he’s so sweet and this is really the sweetness of children. But he just said, he shared that he had been abused by an aunt of his who was actually a child. She was my husband’s youngest sister who was adopted. There’s a 23 year age gap between, so my husband’s the youngest and his dad got remarried and they adopt a little baby from Mexico. And so she at the time, she was 10 and he was five, so another child abusing another child.

And they lived in another state. And we maybe visited twice a year and I had four children at the time and so my four children, they have one only child. Even when we went to stay, all the kids slept in our room when we slept at night. But we did stay at their house and they’re playing. So I’m thinking four kids, one other kid, there’s no dynamic that’s going to happen. They’re all little. I’m going upstairs, checking on them and feeling like everything’s totally appropriate.

We talk about all these things and apparently this had happened once or twice a year, from age five to eight, to when he was telling us so for three years. And what she had told him was that, “I’ve talked to your mom and dad. They said this is okay.” He’s like, “I don’t think I should be doing this.” And they said that, “This is okay. Your mom and dad said this is okay.” And so those little stories that are told and the kids are like, “Well, you’re an older kid than I am. You know, my parents. If she says that, then that’s probably right.”

And then somehow that clicked for him at age eight. And so as he shared that, we went and I told him how grateful I was that he shared that with us and that it wasn’t his fault, that he didn’t do anything wrong and that he was a little kid. And no, she did not ask us if this was okay and we didn’t know. And I also told him that I was mad that someone would hurt my little boy like that. I wasn’t okay with someone hurting him. And we reached out to my in-laws and shared what had happened. So at the time she is 13, he’s eight.

And the way I kind of approached it with them was that right now my loyalty is to my son. Your loyalty is to your daughter. Take care of your daughter. Get appropriate help that she needs and support because somebody has done that to her at 13 or starting at 10. You don’t go and do that to another child unless it’s happened to you. And so I had compassion for them, but also our loyalty was to our son. And we said, “We’re not going to come around to visit for a while. We’ll talk on the phone. We can do things but we want our son to feel completely safe and we need to work with him on healing through this.”

So this little boy, he immediately after telling us, went into a deep depression. Again, just internalizing all those feelings, even though we were saying the contrary to him. But in analyzing all of those feelings and as a mother, that whole component of shame was exactly right. Because for me, the thoughts that came through my mind was, if I have carried shame for so many years that I’ve carried it, and I’m still trying to figure out how to get over shame. I’ve got to nail this thing down. I have to model for him what it looks like to heal from child sexual abuse with no shame.

And so it really kind of lit a fire in me to do the healing work that I needed to do, to open up the conversation and to help him to heal without shame. And so we talked about it often, even after it had happened, we talked about all the changes his body would make and all the different milestones that would happen as he would progress into becoming a young man. And let me tell you what, this beautiful soul, my son, he blew me away. And this is just a testament to when you remove the shame and you support your child and their healing and their growth, how they can really accelerate and become amazing examples for others.

So this young man, when he was in ninth grade, he had a project at school that was where they talked about leadership. And there was a book called The Last Lecture. And The Last Lecture was written about a professor, he was dying of cancer. And if you had to give your last lecture to people, what would you want them to know about you? And so this was kind of the assignment for these kids. And they had this little presentation.

And my little, brave son decided that he was going to share his story with his ninth grade class about being abused and overcoming that. And talking about even how he went a period of time not seeing his grandparents and just that there’s no shame in that and what that looked like for him to heal from that. And everyone was in tears in that whole classroom. I mean talk about a social, vulnerable thing to do in ninth grade.

Amy: Right, in ninth grade, wow.

Rachelle: Yeah. And the principal of the school was teaching the class. And I’m so grateful, the principal called me and he said, “I think you know that this has happened but I want to make sure first of all, you know that your son has shared this with our class.” And I said, “I didn’t know he was going to share that with his class. But I do know this has happened and we’ve done a lot of work.” And he just said, “I just want to tell you there wasn’t a dry eye and that four young girls came forward based on him sharing his story that had never disclosed that. And we were able to connect them with their parents and help them get some support for their experiences.”

And this young man has gone on to go on panels. There’s a wonderful organization called Saprea that works with female survivors of sexual abuse. And he’s done social media clips for them, interviews with them. And he has received an award of the Advocate of the Year. And it’s just such a great thing. And I think there’s two lessons. One, we have to talk about it because even the most protective parents, you’re still at risk because of all of the exposure that we have on the internet, because the internet is essentially raising our children and teaching them about sex and they’re learning at such a young age.

Aa lot of children, there’s even a higher rate now of children abusing other children because of what they learn and then they act that out. And so I think that’s a new danger that wasn’t present maybe 20/30 years ago. And so even the most cautious parents, I mean, if you’re like, “Oh no, I’m a super protective mom.” I would put myself in that category. So I think there’s a lesson there.

And then I also think that there’s a lesson that even if it does happen, if we teach the steps to our children and they share that with us, that they come and actually tell us. Then the training worked. Then we did our job. And then we’re able to help them heal when they were little, not when they’re 40 years later or 20 years later when they’re adult. But actually have them process the emotions as a child and so they can heal from that and they can grow and be strong.

And it can be something that can be an experience that later in life will give them strength. And not be something that is a burden that they carry for so many years and tucked underneath layers of shame. And so, as much as I would have loved to not ever have that experience for my son. I’ve seen beautiful things take place because of that and I’ve seen such a positive impact from that.

Amy: This has been so good and we’re out of time. But just really quickly, if we have parents here that are wanting to start having these conversations with their kids. Where can they find more information from you? Where can they come and find you and find information on how to start having those conversations and how to help teach boundaries and how to teach those phrases so that kids can let go of that shame and be able to have those conversations and make parents aware?

Rachelle: Yeah. Thank you so much. So my Instagram is rachelle.rutherford or my Instagram handle. I have my website that I’m currently in the process of building, and that’s just going to be rachellerutherford.com. But two other really great resources is PC that’s Prevent Child Abuse Utah and so it’s pcau.org. And they have their training that they provide. After this last legislative session for the first time in Utah ever we had funding that was passed and legislation that passed where all children in elementary school will now receive this training. And that just happened this last session after many years of hard work.

The other resource that they can go to is Saprea.org. Saprea.org, has some really great information of my child is two to three, what should I say? My child’s three to five, what are the types of conversations? My teenager is 14 to 17, what should I be talking about then? And so I do love that resource because it’s very narrowed into the age brackets. And I think they do a really great job keeping it really positive for parents.

Amy: That’s amazing. Okay, I’m going to go there too, because it’s always good to just check and say, “Okay, what should we say now?” Because even if you have those conversations, it’s not just a one and done, like you said, you’re building those patterns and helping them build that comfort level over time. So that when something happens, they come to you and you can take care of it earlier rather than later.

Thank you again for coming on. I appreciate it so much. It’s been such a pleasure to talk to you and thank you for being vulnerable and sharing your stories so that we can help maybe prevent some of the other stories that would have happened otherwise.

Rachelle: Absolutely. Thank you for having me. It’s been such a pleasure.

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