The Sinatra Center’s “Protect Yourself Rules” Educational Videos and Lesson Plans Will Soon be Available to Cub Scouts Nationwide
RANCHO MIRAGE, CA (June 20, 2019) – Today, the Barbara Sinatra Children’s Center and Boy Scouts of America formally announced a partnership that will introduce the “Protect Yourself Rules” program to more than 1.2 million Cub Scouts nationwide. Through animated videos and ancillary learning material developed specifically for younger audiences, the program aims to educate children about how to recognize inappropriate behavior, including how to distinguish between safe and unsafe touches, and what to do when confronted with abusive behavior.
The program has been developed and scripted by child advocates, psychologists, and national scholars and tested at various stages of development with students, teachers, school administrators, parents, and experts in the field of child abuse. The videos are separated into two age and grade groups: kindergarten through third grade and fourth grade through sixth.
Jon R. Conte, Ph.D. Professor Emeritus at the University of Washington and Director of the Joshua Center for the Prevention of Child Sexual Abuse who assisted in the development of the series notes: “Few things are as clear in efforts to prevent sexual abuse as is the importance of providing children with the knowledge and skills to identify risk situations and to avoid, escape, or disclose abuse before it happens or after it happens once. This partnership will greatly expand the number of children, and those who love them, with information to help them prevent abuse. No other prevention method is known to be as affective.”
In the animated lessons, the normally complex facets of abuse prevention and intervention focus on two basic elements: children must understand and recognize abuse, and they must feel empowered to say “no” any time they are made to feel uncomfortable. In addition to the videos, the program comes with age and grade-appropriate learning materials and printable extension lessons, designed to foster fundamental understanding of the initiative’s core teachings.
“The ‘Protect Yourself Rules’ campaign has reached millions of children across the country since it launched over two years ago,” explained John Thoresen, Chief Executive of the Foundation and the Barbara Sinatra Center for Abused Children. “We are so proud to be working with the Boy Scouts of America to expand the reach and impact of this critically important initiative.”
Barbara Sinatra Center began development of the “Protect Yourself Rules” in early 2015 and formed a partnership with Boy Scouts of America in 2019, expanding access to these educational resources to millions of young children across the nation. The Center’s video content and lesson plans will build upon and enhance existing programming Boy Scouts of America utilizes to promote personal safety and youth protection that the organization first introduced to the Scouting community in 1986, a groundbreaking step at the time intended to help keep children safe.
“It is a privilege and honor to help prepare youth for their futures through our nation’s foremost program of character development and values-based leadership training. This comes with an important duty: as an organization, we are focused on keeping children safe, supported and protected,” said Michael Surbaugh, Chief Scout Executive of the Boy Scouts of America. “Our partnership with the Barbara Sinatra Children’s Center is an important example of one of the many steps we take to regularly update our efforts to ensure we are doing everything we can to protect youth.”
In support of its youth education and protection efforts, “Protect Yourself Rules” is also endorsed by: National YMCA, National Rural Health Educators, Association of American Educators, National Association of School Psychologists. In addition to the Boy Scouts of America, many schools throughout the United States are using the “Protect Yourself Rules” to comply with state mandated abuse protection education in schools.
To learn more about the program visit: FightChildAbuse.org.
About the Barbara Sinatra Children’s Center
Founded in 1986 by Barbara and Frank Sinatra, the Barbara Sinatra Children’s Center is dedicated to ensuring every child’s right to a normal, healthy and secure childhood. Since its creation, about 23,000 children have received outpatient mental health and counseling services at the center.,. The Center provides individual, group and family therapy along with special programs that address issues associated with children suffering the effects of child abuse and neglect. An estimated 700 children are counseled annually on an outpatient basis, and no child is ever turned away because of a family’s inability to pay. For more information, visit: BarbaraSinatraChildrensCenter.org. The animated video series was funded by the Barbara Sinatra Children’s Center Foundation and has over 13 million YouTube views, many in classrooms throughout the United States and in many foreign countries. Those 13 million views have conservatively reached over 100 million.
About the Boy Scouts of America
The Boy Scouts of America provides the nation’s foremost youth program of character development and values-based leadership training, which helps young people be “Prepared. For Life.®” The Scouting organization is composed of nearly 2.2 million youth members between the ages of 5 and 21 and approximately 960,000 volunteers in local councils throughout the United States and its territories. For more information on the Boy Scouts of America, please visit www.Scouting.org.
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