Children’s Picture Book and Sexual Abuse Storytellin

Abstract

Although sexual abuse is a sensitive issue in societies, it is an important problem in society especially for small children that are vulnerable. Media selection and tactics to properly present this issue are essential to protect children and to effectively communicate. Children’s picture book is a medium selected to communicate this issue with expectation that it can help children to learn about rights over their own bodies, good and bad touch, and be able to protect themselves from being victims of sexual abuse. This article focuses on presenting three children’s picture books that aim to prevent child sexual abuse, necessary to present sexual abuse related issue, children’s picture book and sexual related issues’ presentation, and tactics to narrate sexual abuse in children’s picture book.

 This article found that all these three books emphasis on understanding toward sexual abuse’ situation and child’s protection through children’s characters both boy and girl. Children’s picture book is also a suitable medium since it is an imaginative world to prepare children to face with the real world. Children’s exposure to children’s picture book having sexual abuse protection’s contents will provide them with working memory skills, and be able to effectively protect themselves and neglect any bad touch request. Regarding tactics used for narrate this issue, there are seven tactics as theme, plot, settings, characters, language usage, text and picture combination, and narration based on fact. Theme of all books focus on rights over their own bodies which no one can violate through simple plot that rapidly leads to the problem and ending with ease. Settings imitate story being happened in place that is familiar for children such as home or school. All main characters are human with child’s personality to create closeness and easy to connect themselves to that story. Moreover, language usage with simple sentence and easy to grasp has been used. Text and picture combination is also used to narrate the story. Finally, fact based narration has been used by linking sexual abuse story that can happened in the real world to situation children familiar with, acceptance to children’s feelings toward confronting sexual abuse, and indication of person that children can depend on when confronts with sexual abuse.