What Safeguarding Children from Sexual Abuse Actually Requires (and Why We Keep Avoiding It)

Two weeks ago, a Muslim organization released a “toolkit” on child sexual abuse prevention. In other words, a web page with two-dozen documents/resources organized into neat categories. As I browsed through the website, a few emotions rose up in me. Frustration. Disappointment. A deep sense of fatigue that seemed to settle into my body and weigh me down.

I took a few days to sit with all of it rather than react right away, and I challenged myself to ask what these emotions were telling me. As I sat with the answer, I realized I had things to say. After almost two decades of working in Muslim communities across North America, often on the most challenging and fringe topics no one else wanted to touch, I could probably write a book. But let's start with this blog post, because what I have to share is about witnessing the soul of the Muslim community, the parts we keep looking away from, and what that avoidance costs the children we say we are trying to protect.

A year ago, this same organization brought three of us together to explore a collaboration across scholarship, public health, Islamic psychology, and lived expertise, an attempt at something genuinely interdisciplinary rather than a single voice speaking for every angle a topic like this requires. We had already developed a safeguarding course bridging Islamic principles with the practical, on the ground work of preventing child sexual abuse, and that work became part of what we brought to the conversation. The collaboration did not move forward at the request of this organization, as they felt that we had explored available options and it was best to develop “in-house” resources.

This most recent toolkit is the resulting output from this same organization. So, when its announcement appeared in my social media feed, the fatigue I felt was not about one web page. It was the weight of watching, once again, what happens when an organization keeps choosing to work with a narrower slice of expertise than an issue like child sexual abuse prevention actually requires.

This is not an isolated story, and it is not only about this one organization. Following the arrest of Wisam Sharieff in late 2024, I sat in meetings with a local Islamic center about their safeguarding work, only to be met with silence/ghosting when I asked what it would look like to formalize my role, given the long-term nature of work required. I also heard, across two meetings, about community education efforts led by individuals not trained in abuse prevention, and from a staff member who displayed vicarious trauma and shared an inappropriate amount of detail about a prior case of child sexual abuse that she did not report to the authorities – even though she is a mandated reporter.

I also met with a popular Muslim non-profit educational organization, after being connected as a content expert to develop abuse prevention approaches. After this initial meeting and a couple of follow-up emails I sent, I spent five months waiting to hear back about next steps. A new HR hire then emailed me, asking me to submit a full proposal to support their safeguarding effort. I put together a thorough 12-page document with timeline, outcomes, etc and emailed it back. I was then sent an email asking me if I knew anyone else who did this work.

Different institutions, different excuses, and underneath all of it, the same pattern.

This is not simply about credit or compensation, though both matter. Over the years I have built child sexual abuse prevention curricula for Islamic schools from the ground up, designed the reporting procedures those schools now use when a concern arises, trained their staff, and led parent workshops both inside those schools and across the broader community. I have led abuse prevention classes with children across kindergarten through to middle school. I have sat across from children who disclosed abuse, and from their parents in the hours and days after. I now sit, in my clinical work, with adult after adult who is disclosing their own sexual harm for the first time, often decades later. This is not theoretical work for me. It is not a framework I read about once. It is what I have spent years doing in rooms with actual families, actual schools, and actual children. In mosques and community centers, over and over again.

So I want to name the pattern I keep running into honestly, because I think it explains something bigger than my own frustration. It explains why, after years of guides, courses, khutbahs, and online panels about protecting our children, so many of our schools still do not have a functioning reporting mechanism. Why so many of our mosques have never run a background check on the community member who has volunteered with children every Sunday for a decade. Why so many of our children are still growing up without the words for their own bodies.

The Comfort of an Online Document

There is a particular kind of Muslim institutional response to crisis that has become so familiar it barely registers as a choice anymore. Something happens, or something almost happens, or a community becomes aware of a danger it had been avoiding, and the response is to produce a document or a statement. A social media post with a clarifying statement. A “call to action” signed by scholars and Imams, naming the relevant Islamic principles. A foreword from a respected scholar, an introduction tracing the research, footnotes citing hadith alongside CDC statistics.

I want to be clear that this work has real value. Correcting the theological misunderstandings that let abuse continue is necessary and difficult scholarship, and it takes real courage to write plainly that religious credentials do not guarantee safety, that four witnesses were never meant to govern how a community responds to a child's disclosure, that concealing sin has limits when a child is the one being harmed. These, and much more, are true and important correctives. And for those seeking a credible, well-researched, and nuanced resource that addresses this specific angle, I’d recommend this resource developed by Dr. Mariam Sheibani, as part of Ma’ruf Commons.

Let me go back to the toolkit that started this reflection to explain why online documents simply aren’t enough. It was organized into resource categories for different roles, with roughly two dozen downloadable files across these groups. A safeguarding policy here, a staff handbook there, lesson plans, checklists, conversation cards, and a brief guide for conversations across various ages.

Now…imagine you are a parent, school teacher, or administrator arriving at that page for the first time. You scroll. Six files under one heading, six under another, eight under a third. Your eyes move down the list and something in your chest tightens before you have even opened one.

Where do I start? What comes first and what can wait? OK, so just use the template and adapt it for my school, that’s it? Do I need to read all of this before I do anything, or is there one document that tells me what to do on Monday morning? But the teachers are already overwhelmed – I’m not sure we can add this onto their plate and into our schedule?

Your chest tightening and feeling overwhelmed is not a character flaw. It is a completely reasonable nervous system response to being handed multiple documents with no order, no owner, and no roadmap. Overwhelm is not a failure to try hard enough. It is what happens when a body meets more than it can hold, and instead of naming that moment and working with it, most of us do what we have always done with overwhelm, we quietly close the tab and tell ourselves we will come back to it later.

Compare this to what a genuinely operational safeguarding process looks like. An organization in DC with whom I’ve collaborated with have what they call a Safe(r) Space Process, and it reads nothing like a document library. There is one dedicated email address, monitored by a specifically named intake coordinator. There is a separate channel if the concern involves someone in leadership. There is a defined sequence, an intake conversation, a set of real options presented to the person who was harmed, ranging from mediation to an accountability letter to a referral to a victim's advocate to the explicit option of taking no action at all, with the person harmed retaining autonomy over what happens next. The page states plainly when it was last updated, because it is maintained as living infrastructure rather than published once and left to gather dust. And I personally know that they’re in the process of revisiting and updating this process. Nothing about it is theologically elaborate. It does not need to be. It is a pathway a person can walk down, with a named human being waiting at the other end, not a document they have to find their own way through alone. Having been involved in this process, I can tell you for certain that is real and lived. It’s not a webpage that has no action behind.

This is the difference between knowledge and infrastructure. Documents can be created and posted. A pathway has to be lived in, staffed, maintained, and used, and that is precisely the part our institutions keep skipping.

There is also something underneath the document itself worth naming, something I have written about before in the context of how our community approaches mental health more broadly. So much of Muslim discourse on difficult subjects, sexual abuse included, gets framed as an Islamic perspective, an Islamic guide, what Islam says. That framing is not wrong in itself; our tradition has real wisdom to offer here. But notice what that framing does to the work. It keeps the entire subject in the register of religious education and knowledge - keeping us in the mind/brain/head. Safeguarding children becomes something to be understood correctly, argued precisely, footnoted thoroughly, much the way our field has leaned so heavily on cognitive behavioral approaches that treat distress primarily as a thinking problem to be corrected rather than a felt, embodied experience to be witnessed. A guide answers the question of what Islam says about abuse. It does not touch the shame sitting in a parent's chest when they imagine having ongoing body safety conversations with their own child. It does not touch the tightness in a teacher's stomach when she notices something that does not sit right and must decide, in her body, in real time, whether to act on it. We keep producing correct thinking about a problem that lives, for most of us, somewhere far below the level of thought.

And if it lives below the level of thought, then no document, however sound, was ever going to be the mechanism that moves it. Real safeguarding requires something documents cannot provide: intentionality sustained over years, not a single season of urgency. Relationships built slowly between in-house staff, contracted experts, community organizations, parents, and board members, none of whom show up already aligned, all of whom have to be brought into the same understanding through actual conversation, actual friction, actual time spent in the same room working through what each of them is afraid of, defensive about, or simply doesn't yet understand. This is not glamorous work. It rarely produces something you can post. It looks like meetings that don't resolve cleanly, policies that get revised three times before anyone trusts them, a board member who needs to be walked through the same concern twice before it actually lands.

There are no shortcuts here, and there shouldn't be, because the process itself, slow, uncomfortable, and often unresolved, is what builds the trust and shared ownership a document alone never can. A guide can be finished in an afternoon. A pathway that people will actually use in a crisis takes years to earn.

And this is difficult for the best of us, not because our institutions lack good people, but because most of us are, in some real sense, disconnected from our own emotional landscape long before we ever sit down at that table. Most of us carry real shame and discomfort around sexual health, our own and our children's, shame that predates any single institution and runs through how we were raised to relate to our bodies in the first place. Ask a room full of well-intentioned adults to sit with the specifics, what does grooming actually sound like, what does a child's disclosure actually require of the adult hearing it, what does it feel like in your own body to have that conversation with your own child, and watch how quickly the room reaches for policy language instead. Policy language is safer. It keeps the conversation in the head, where it's precise and defensible, rather than in the body, where it's actually uncomfortable. We reach for the document not only because it's easier to produce than infrastructure, but because staying in the discomfort long enough to build real infrastructure would ask something of us that most of us were never taught how to do, stay present with something difficult in our own bodies rather than resolve it, explain it away, or hand it off to someone else.

Where Abuse Happens

It would be easy for a piece like this to leave you with the impression that the danger lives mostly inside institutions, in the unvetted Quran teacher or the Imam with unsupervised access to children. It does not. Every reliable study on this says the same thing, and years of sitting with disclosures have confirmed it for me directly. Over ninety percent of child sexual abuse is committed by someone the child already knows and trusts, a cousin, an uncle, a babysitter, a coach, sometimes a Quran teacher, a father, a neighbor. The overwhelming majority of this harm happens inside homes, inside families, inside the spaces we consider safest because they are the most familiar.

I am guessing that many of you reading this already knew that number. I am also guessing that knowing it and feeling it are two different things, and I want to ask you something directly before you keep reading. Check in with your body right now. What is happening in your chest, your stomach, your jaw. Is there any tightness. Is your breath shallow or full. Did a name cross your mind just now, someone in your own family or your own child's life, and did you notice yourself push that thought away before it could finish forming.

Emotions always leave a trace in the body, whether we let ourselves name them in words or we don't. This moment of noticing, right now, is the actual work, not the statistic itself, and the willingness to stay with what the statistic does to you physically, for even ten seconds longer than feels comfortable, is where that work actually happens.

This is the level of work our community needs to do, and it is not a level any guide or toolkit can reach for you. We have plenty of shame already sitting in our bodies around this subject, inherited across generations, and until we practice staying present with that shame long enough to move through it, we will keep reaching for the nearest document instead.

What My Own Numbers Tell Me

I want to turn this same scrutiny toward my own work, because it would be dishonest to write this piece as though the gap only lives in other people's projects.

In the spring of 2025, thirty-eight people signed up for the safeguarding course referenced earlier. I checked the member list recently. Only six of those thirty-eight had logged back in and accessed the material since. This is not unique to that one course. It is the pattern across nearly everything I have built. In November of 2024, after the news broke about Wisam Sharieff's arrest, I put together a free prevention toolkit for parents and released it online. I was working on my book manuscript at the time, and paused this work so I could create something truly practical, not superficial, for parents. It was downloaded more than a thousand times. I would be surprised if even one in ten of those parents has implemented what it describes.

I share this not to be self-deprecating or braggy, but to be honest. My materials are built specifically to translate theology into practice, after years of doing this work with real communities, schools, and families, and they still sit largely unopened after the download. That tells me something important. The gap between knowledge and practice is not primarily a content problem. It is not solved by simply having better resources, more accessible resources, or more of them. Something else is happening at the level of the individual parent and the individual staff member, something that no PDF, however well written, can reach on its own.

Why We Keep Choosing the Document

I do not think this happens because our institutions do not care about children. I think it happens because the document, and the download, and the course sign up, are all ways of avoiding a discomfort that most of us have never learned how to sit with.

Consider what it requires to build real safeguarding, at every level where it needs to exist.

At the institutional level, it means an organization choosing ongoing accountability over the comfort of trusting people simply because they are known, pious, or well credentialed. It means holding open, indefinitely, the possibility that someone the community has structured itself around trusting could cause harm. That is a much harder posture to sustain than publishing a toolkit once and calling the matter addressed.

Institutional avoidance tends to wear a few disguises worth naming specifically, because I hear all of them constantly. The first is scarcity. We just don't have the funds, an organization will say, when a proposal for training or ongoing safeguarding work comes in. I have heard this line more times than I can count, often from institutions that manage to fund new buildings, elaborate events, and visiting speaker honorariums within the same budget cycle. The money is very often there. What is missing is not funds but priority, and naming a budget constraint is a far more comfortable thing to say out loud than admitting that child safety simply did not make the list of what matters enough to pay for.

The second is the belief that one trusted person can speak to everything. I watched a local masjid ask their religious educator to give the community a talk on the different types of child abuse. This was not that person's area of training, but the decision made a kind of sense from inside the avoidance, because bringing in an actual specialist means admitting, out loud, that the person already on staff is not equipped for every subject that matters, and that admission itself feels uncomfortable. It is easier to hand the topic to whoever is already trusted and already in the building than to invite someone new in and sit with the vulnerability of not having all the expertise under one roof, the same instinct, in different clothing, as building a toolkit rather than sustaining a team of specialists whose disciplines actually cover the ground the topic requires.

The third disguise might be the most honest one to name, because it points at something closer to character than circumstance. I'm busy or overwhelmed, people will say, when asked why this work keeps slipping down the list. I want to be direct about this one, because I hear it constantly, including from people I genuinely respect. I'm busy and overwhelmed too. Everyone doing meaningful work in this community is busy. Busy is not a reason. Busy is what we say when we have quietly decided, without saying so out loud, that something else matters more than this does. That is not a scheduling problem. It is a lack of integrity, and I use that word carefully. Integrity is not the same as being a good person in every other area of your life. It is holding what you say matters to you against what you actually spend your time and money doing, and being willing to notice when the two do not match. When they do not match on a subject as consequential as a child's safety, the honest response is not to explain the mismatch away with busyness. It is to ask what is being avoided, and why staying busy with something else feels safer than sitting with that answer.

The same avoidance shows up one level down, at the level of the individual bystander. There, it means noticing a volunteer alone with a child in a hallway or a supply closet and choosing not to walk over and ask what is going on, even though the moment might be awkward, even though you might be wrong, even though the person might be your friend's husband. A policy binder cannot make that choice for you. Only a person who has practiced tolerating social discomfort in service of a child's safety can make it in the moment it is needed.

And at the level of the parent, it means avoiding the body safety conversation your own child needs, not once, but as an ongoing part of how you raise them. It means avoiding naming actual body parts out loud to a small child. It means avoiding the plain explanation that no adult automatically has access to their body, including relatives, including religious teachers, including people whose recitation makes you weep. Underneath that conversation sits an even harder one, which is acknowledging, even for a moment, that the person most likely to harm your child is someone you already trust. Not a stranger, someone beloved. That possibility is almost unbearable to hold, so the conversation gets deferred, they are too young, it will scare them, we will talk about it when they are older, every deferral a discomfort avoided, dressed up as protectiveness.

Institutional avoidance, bystander avoidance, and parental avoidance can look like three separate failures. I do not think they are. I think they are one failure, showing up at different scales, and the root of it sits somewhere deeper than any of the three.

The Root Underneath All of It

What sits underneath all of this, I think, is simpler and harder to fix than any single institutional failure. Most of us were never taught how to stay present with our own difficult internal states without immediately trying to make them go away. We were not taught to witness our own shame, our own fear, our own grief, with any real compassion or steadiness. So when life asks something of us that requires exactly that capacity, sitting with the discomfort of a hard truth long enough to act on it rather than around it, we reach instead for whatever makes the discomfort disappear fastest.

A document does that beautifully. It lets a community feel the full weight of a crisis and then set it down. It creates the sensation of having faced something without requiring anyone to stay in the room with what was uncomfortable about it. A download does the same thing for a parent. The act of downloading a free forty-page toolkit produces a small, real relief, a sense of having done something, and that relief can be mistaken for the work itself.

This is why, without a practice of turning inward first, our outward accountability keeps collapsing into the same shape. A community that has not built the muscle of witnessing its own internal landscape, individually and collectively, will not have the muscle to witness harm happening in front of it either. The willingness to interrupt a volunteer and ask an uncomfortable question, to hold a beloved teacher accountable, to have the hard conversation with your child, all of it draws on the same well. If that well has never been dug, we default to whatever requires the least of us. We produce a guide. We build a toolkit. We download it, feel moved, and set it aside.

This is the heart of what witnessing the soul asks of us, and it is not a soft or peripheral idea here. It is the missing piece underneath nearly everything we have discussed so far.

To witness the soul is to turn toward whatever is uncomfortable inside us with compassion instead of judgment, with curiosity instead of avoidance, and with a willingness to hold ourselves accountable for what we find there rather than looking away from it. Emotions are so often treated in our community as a distraction from the real work, something to manage or suppress so we can get on with what matters. But emotions are not separate from the qalb, the heart, which our tradition holds as the very center of the soul, the seat of perception, intention, and moral clarity. When we bypass what we feel, we are not bypassing something incidental. We are bypassing the organ through which we are meant to perceive truth and act on it. This is not a metaphor. A community that has trained itself out of feeling, out of naming shame, fear, and grief with any honesty, has also trained itself out of the very faculty it needs to protect its children well. The shame a parent feels imagining the body safety conversation, the fear an institution feels imagining what a background check might uncover, the discomfort a bystander feels in the moment before deciding to interrupt, all of it moves through the qalb. If we have not practiced sitting with the qalb's discomfort in the small, daily moments of our lives, we will not have the capacity to sit with it here, when a child's safety depends on it.

I do not say this as an accusation from outside the pattern. I say it because I recognize it in myself too, in every moment I have chosen the easier feeling over the harder truth. The difference, if there is one, is that I have spent years building the practice of staying present with what is uncomfortable, in my own life and in this work, and I have come to believe that this practice is not optional if we want our children to be safer than we were.

A Test Worth Asking Honestly

If your school, mosque, or organization has produced a safeguarding statement, a policy, or a toolkit, it is worth asking a few honest questions before assuming the work is done.

Is there a reporting mechanism a child or a parent could name right now, without looking it up?

Are staff and volunteers trained as mandated reporters, with documentation to prove it, not just a verbal assurance that they know what to do?

Has anyone with unsupervised access to children had a background check in the last year?

Was the person who delivered your last training on this subject trained in it, or were they simply the trusted person already on staff?

Do parents have real language and tools for ongoing conversations at home in the context of sexual health overall, and not just for preventing sexual abuse?

If a disclosure happened tomorrow, does anyone know the first three steps to take, including supporting the child, who to contact, and how to take care of themselves?

And one more, harder than the rest. When you are around children in any setting, regardless of whether you are a parent or not, are you keeping a vigilant eye outwards and also tracking your gut instinct? Would you follow through with checking in on a child or adult if something felt off?

As of this writing, it is still possible to visit the websites of major Islamic educational organizations, some of them years removed from public scandals involving exactly this issue, and find no published policy for what happens if someone experiences an unsafe, uncomfortable, harmful, or abusive interaction during a class or event. Not a hard to find policy. No policy at all. That absence is itself an answer to the test, and it tells you plainly which comes first for these institutions, the discomfort of building the infrastructure or the comfort of not having to.

What Actual Infrastructure Looks Like

I have spent years trying to build the bridge between Islamic principles and lived practice, and my own numbers have humbled me about how far a well-built resource can carry that bridge on its own. I still believe the resources matter. A course, a toolkit, a set of conversation guides, all of it gives a community somewhere to start. But I no longer believe distributing better content is the lever that moves the needle. What moves it looks more like a named person, a live channel, a defined next step, options that keep the person harmed in control, and a page that gets updated because someone is responsible for it staying true.

That is the direction I want to keep building in, work that does not end at the download, work built for the ongoing discomfort of practice rather than the one-time comfort of reading.

If you're looking for a place to start that goes beyond a document, I've built a resources page with a few ways you can actually invest in safeguarding children, not just read about it. A practical guide for parents through ongoing body safety conversations at every age, not a one-time talk you check off and move past. A collaborative course, the first of its kind, that bridges Islamic scholarship, public health, community work, and Islamic Psychology into something families, educators, and communities can actually work through together. And my book, for those who want the fuller foundation underneath all of it.

What It Costs Us to Keep Avoiding This

I have noticed something over the years that I think is worth naming plainly, because I do not believe I am the only practitioner it has happened to. The people who have done the inward work, who can sit with discomfort without flinching, who show up fully accountable and expect the same from the institutions they work with, tend to be the ones who get quietly routed around, not rejected outright, just slowly, softly let go of. It looks like silence after a direct question, or a request to find someone cheaper, the same scarcity that always finds room for whoever costs less, or a course cited in the footnotes of a guide that never carried our names.

I do not think this happens because the expertise is lacking. I think it happens because proximity to someone who is not avoiding the discomfort makes it harder for everyone else to keep avoiding it too, and the easiest way to resolve that tension is distance, not growth.

This is, in the end, the same pattern the whole piece has been describing, just turned toward the practitioners themselves. A community that has not learned to sit with its own discomfort will struggle to sustain relationships with the people whose entire practice is refusing to look away from it. Until we change that, at the level of the qalb (heart), the individual, the parent, and the institution, we will keep producing online documents that tell the truth beautifully, and children who remain no safer for any of it.

If You Need More Support

If any part of what I've shared here felt familiar, my book goes deeper into how to soulfully teach children about their sexual health, and I also offer guidance sessions for parents who require support around these ongoing conversations. You don't have to learn this the hard way, the way I did. I share more about what witnessing the soul tangibly means and how it looks in daily life through my weekly newsletter.

Join my newsletter below, and let's keep witnessing ourselves - and the children around us - together.

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