Primary prevention is a medical term that describes powerful measures that prevent rather than treat illness, e.g. immunization, regular exercise, proper nutrition, not smoking.
Ask yourselves why there is so much attention given to secondary and tertiary prevention of child abuse and so little attention given to primary prevention.
Dr. John Briere, professor of Psychiatry and the Behavioral Sciences at the Keck School of Medicine, University of Southern California, and Center Director of the USC Adolescent Trauma Training Center of the National Child Traumatic Stress Network stated,
“If we could somehow end child abuse and neglect, the eight hundred pages of the DSM...would be shrunk to a pamphlet in two generations.”
What are the real consequences of ending child abuse and neglect and shrinking the DSM to a pamphlet?
I can think of one. There wouldn’t be any need for most of the organizations and businesses involved in intervention, treatment, healing, rehabilitation, and recovery. Would these billion dollar businesses willingly accept obsolescence?
I doubt it.
In order to protect their interests I suspect they’d act passively and perhaps actively to retard and obstruct the implementation of the primary prevention of unsupportive and harmful parenting.
I’m not suggesting that there are indeed deliberate and malicious attempts to thwart the efforts of organizations working on the primary prevention of child abuse, but the businesses and organizations doing reactive work are legion and powerful and they have the ability to steer people’s thinking and policymaking...whereas the organizations doing primary prevention are few and puny.
Sometimes a disease metaphor is useful. Polio wasn’t eradicated by treatment. It was ended by primary prevention, a vaccine. Like polio, child abuse will be ended not by intervention, treatment, healing, rehabilitation, and recovery but by primary prevention in the form of an entirely new kind of parenting education...one that reaches everyone, everywhere, all the time.
So, the next time you contemplate why things are the way they are, and why people, organizations, and businesses act the way they do, consider this sage advice.
Follow the money!
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