"Protecting The Gift: Keeping Children and Teenagers Safe (and Parents Sane)"
by Gavin De Becker
Review by Robin Kittrelle, RNP

Could a book about how people harm children be a page-turner? It is hard to imagine, but that is what this book is. Gavin De Becker writes so clearly and with such refreshing insight about everyday risks (explaining exactly how children are at risk) that his book should be required reading for everyone--doctors, nurses, teachers, or parents--who interacts with children. Our patients and their children depend on us to share this information with them. Whether you read this book in a day or read it over the next few months, I implore you to get a copy; and when you are finished, loan it to someone else.

Gavin De Becker is a leading expert in predicting violence. His clients include the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the US Supreme Court. Protecting the Gift: Keeping Children and Teenagers Safe (and Parents Sane) is a follow-up to his extraordinary 1997 bestseller, The Gift of Fear: Survival Signs That Protect Us From Violence. Protecting the Gift is about protecting the children who live in your city or town. It is thus about today's world as well as its future.

Although parents, teachers, doctors, and nurses are usually willing to look at safety issues, all are usually uncomfortably quiet or look away when the subject of sexual impropriety involving children is brought up. We often hear, "Not in that family" and, most commonly, "Not in my family" or "Not in my practice."

Protecting The Gift tells stories that deserve to be heard. Infrequently, we read lurid cases in the newspaper, but far more commonly we see the unrecognized sequelae of these cases in our offices. The author writes about these sequelae in a clear and straightforward manner and seems unconcerned with "political correctness." In fact, the author blames the widespread value placed on "being nice" as one causative factor in becoming first a target of violence and then its prey. For instance, De Becker notes that while we teach our children not to talk to strangers, those same children watch us talk to a multitude of strangers every day. A better plan, he suggests, is to supervise children as they talk to strangers and then discuss the encounter afterward so that they may learn to exercise their own intuition and learn how to make safe choices about the people they encounter.

De Becker wants readers to acknowledge that human-to-human violence and sexual abuse are, indeed, human behaviors: Adult humans do engage in sexual activity with children. Yes, the author says, this behavior is repulsive, destructive, and inhumane, but it is human. This is the first point to understand in protecting yourself and others in your care. If we refuse to see violence and sexual contact with children as human--and therefore possible--we can neither predict nor prevent it. (If you argue that you could never become violent, ask yourself what your response would be if someone tried to harm your child.)

The author makes the point that childhood is not inherently safe; it is safe only when adults make it so. To that end, our intuition about people can be a wonderful guardian. We can all think of a time when we listened to our intuition (ie, listened to our unconscious selves) and were grateful--and a time when, to our regret, we ignored our intuition. To protect our children, we first must learn how to protect ourselves from "things we'd rather not have to think about" and then teach our children to protect themselves similarly. De Becker writes that denial is "like waking up in your house with a room full of smoke, opening the window to let the smoke out, and then going back to bed."

The author has developed "The Test of Twelve," a list of what children would ideally know before ever being alone in public. For example, item five in the list instructs children how to choose whom to ask for help ("ask a woman, not a [male] security guard"); and item 11 teaches children that if someone says "Don't yell," the thing to do is yell. De Becker also talks about our "logic brain" and our "wild brain." The logic brain is revered by society but is slow to react and weighs past and present rules about how things should be before reacting. In contrast, the wild brain answers to no one and has no reluctance to immediately do "whatever it takes."

De Becker makes a convincing case that violence almost always has detectable prior indicators that our wild brain recognizes and alerts us about through doubt, suspicion, apprehension, hesitation, and that urgent and most valuable indicator, fear. The author says that the wild brain is our best resource in this regard–-it may not be the loudest voice, but it is the wisest.

Society has trained us that, for any given problem, some professional knows best: just keep searching and someone will tell us what to do. Because we have been taught to trust others over ourselves, we may decide to ignore our discomfort when the school principal tells us that an overly friendly teacher's aide is a "nice man" or that several other neighborhood parents use a particular baby-sitter who seems somehow odd to us. Hesitation may be all you have to go on, but the expert voice that matters most is your own. Acting on intuition might be inconvenient, unpopular, or even rude--but as victims of violence would say, those are small matters compared with what they have experienced.

So, learn how to listen to your wild brain. Read this book and I think you will find that instead of being horrified by what you learn, you will be sur
prised by what you didn't know; and that instead of being frightened, you will be empowered. You also may be better able to help patients by sensing more accurately what is going on in their lives.

Dial Press, 1999, $22.95. 336 pages; ISBN 0385333099

To Book Reviews Index | To next Book Review

To full contents list for this Journal >>