Following recent cases of child sexual assault and murder across India, a familiar cycle has gripped the nation: public outrage, grief, and the reflexive, well-meaning advice to ‘tell your daughters to be careful’. However, leading mental health experts warn that conventional, fear-based warnings are failing our children. Also read | Kids’ safety 101: Essential lessons for parents to ensure a safer tomorrow
Worse, they often inadvertently shift the burden of safety onto the victims themselves. True prevention requires shifting away from vague lectures about ‘stranger danger’ toward actionable, rehearsed tools that empower children — without instilling paralysis or fear.
The illusion of ‘carefulness’
“Another child. Another headline. Another set of parents who will never be the same, and another wave of a country performing outrage for a week before moving on to the next tragedy. We have become fluent in grief and illiterate in prevention. Every time this happens, someone repeats the same tired line — tell your daughter to be careful — as though carefulness has ever once stopped a predator. It hasn’t. It never will,” warned Dr Pankaja Singh, founder and senior psychologist at the Mental Wellness Centre in Gurugram, in an interview with HT Lifestyle.
Dr Singh noted that caution assumes a child can visually identify danger. In reality, harm rarely arrives looking menacing. “It arrives looking like kindness, familiarity, even help. What actually protects a child is not caution but rehearsal,” she said.
Dr SA Idrees, consultant psychiatrist at Manipal Hospitals in Bhubaneswar, echoed this sentiment, cautioning parents against using fear as a primary teaching tool: “Most safety talks we give children don’t really work. Sometimes they do the opposite. If you frighten a child too much, they either stop listening or start thinking everyone is dangerous. Neither of those keeps them safe.”
Cracking the predator’s playbook: the ‘trick talk’
To protect children, adults must first break their own silence regarding how predators actually operate. Predators rarely rely on overt threats initially; instead, they exploit a child’s natural desire to be polite, helpful, or compliant with adults.
Dr Idrees identified the most common lures used to bypass a child’s defences:
⦿ Tangible rewards: Offering chocolates, cash, small gifts, or a ‘free ride’.
⦿ The helpful setup: Asking the child for assistance or directions.
⦿ The authority fabric: Claiming a parent is in trouble or sent them to fetch the child (Sample: ‘Your mother met with an accident, she sent me to get you’).
Once the predator establishes contact, they deploy their most dangerous psychological tool: the demand for secrecy. “The people who harm children usually don’t look scary at all,” Dr Idrees said. He explained: “They offer chocolates, a gift, a free ride, and a game. Then they say, ‘Keep this a secret between us.’ That’s the warning sign, no matter how nice they seem. A gift doesn’t mean the child has to keep quiet, and children need to hear that clearly.”
Dr Singh described this defensive education as pattern recognition: “Children who have heard this pattern named even once are far more likely to trust their own discomfort instead of overriding it to be polite. It is pattern recognition, offered calmly, the way we teach a child to recognise a hot stove without dwelling on the burn.”
Actionable toolkits: Moving from lectures to ‘C.O.D.E.’
Instead of broad, abstract instructions like ‘find a grown-up’, psychologists advocate for concrete, highly rehearsed strategies. They recommended a structured framework called C.O.D.E.:
1. Circle
Rather than telling a child to find any adult — an instruction that fails in a panic because a child cannot accurately judge a stranger’s intent — parents should explicitly name three to five specific, trusted adults (for example, a specific teacher, an aunt, a designated neighbour). “Naming the people in advance removes that impossible decision entirely,” Dr Singh said. Dr Idrees agreed, adding, “Three or four is enough.”
2. Ownership
This requires teaching children, plainly and repeatedly, that their bodies belong strictly to them. Dr Idrees advised parents to use proper anatomical terms rather than euphemisms: “Tell them the parts a swimsuit covers are private. Nobody touches them, nobody asks to see them, except a doctor with a parent in the room. And that odd feeling in the tummy when something isn’t right? Tell them to trust it.” Crucially, children must know they have the right to say ‘no’ to any adult — “Even an uncle. Even someone they love.”
3. Distress word (family code word)
Families should establish a secret code word known only to them. If a stranger or acquaintance approaches a child claiming, “Your mother sent me,” the child must ask for the code word. If the adult cannot provide it, the child knows instantly not to cooperate. “No word, no cooperation, no exceptions — regardless of how convincing or kind the person seems, because predators count on children’s instinct to comply with confident adults,” Dr Singh shared. Dr Idrees reinforced this rule: “If the pickup plan changes, the child should check with you first, not just believe a stranger.”
4. Escape
Children need explicit, repeated permission to break social norms to protect themselves. They must know it is acceptable to scream, run, throw a tantrum, or cause a massive scene if they feel unsafe. “That is survival, not disrespect,” Dr Singh underscored. “A child who has only ever been trained to be agreeable will freeze in exactly the moment freezing is most dangerous,” she added.
Rehearsal over reminders
Both experts stressed that a single, solemn discussion at the dinner table is entirely ineffective under pressure. Safety mechanics must be practised dynamically. “Act it out,” suggested Dr Idrees, adding, “Make up small situations and let them practise. Children remember what they’ve practised much better than what they’ve been warned about. Teach them what to do, not just what to be afraid of.”
Shifting the burden: the role of schools and society
Crucially, providing children with these defensive tools is not an invitation to blame them if harm occurs. Both psychologists are unyielding on this point: the responsibility for abuse lies solely and entirely with the perpetrator.
“There is a lazy version of ‘safety education’ that slides into victim-blaming — asking what a girl was wearing, why she was out, whether she should have known better,” Dr Singh stated flatly. “That version is not protection. It lets the actual perpetrator recede into the background while the harmed child is put on trial in public opinion. The question was never about her choices. It was always, only, about the person who chose to hurt her,” she said.
Dr Idrees added: “Please, never let a child feel that something bad happened because they weren’t careful enough… keeping children safe is a job for parents, teachers and the whole community. It was never a child’s job to carry alone.”
According to the experts, this framework places a heavy mandate on educational institutions. Schools cannot discharge their duty through a single, annual awareness assembly. According to experts, body autonomy, boundary-setting, and consent must be integrated into regular curricula alongside standard subjects like road safety and first aid, so they feel normal rather than terrifying.
Furthermore, because teachers interact with children daily across multiple contexts, they are uniquely positioned to spot early signs of distress. However, institutional oversight must back up this vigilance. As Dr Singh concluded: “A code word and a trusted circle can help a child in the moment, but they cannot substitute for institutions that take reports seriously, investigate quickly, and hold perpetrators accountable… Give them C.O.D.E. Give them belief. Give them both before it is too late.”
Note to readers: This article is for informational purposes only and not a substitute for professional advice.
