You have been given some great advice from some solid people.
Remember Zues you have been engaging in "keeping yourself safe conversations" with your children since they were born.
Your conversations have been based on your children's developmental stages, and for the most part they were focussed on the 'safe topics' related to child safety, like not poking things into to electric topics and not running around with food and wearing helmets while skating or biking.
You have likely felt comfortable delving into stopping violence converastions- 'good behaviour' related to not hitting others and not allowing others to hit you, using kind words rather than unkind words. T
These conversations about violence tend to be a parents first interface with conversations about personal boundaries, often physical boundaries. The keeping yourself safe conversation related to personal space related to one's body and sexual safety is just an extension of this conversation. And often where parents feel less comfortable.
Ideally when discussing physical violence or verbal violence parents could or should be adding the boundaries related to good and bad touch too. Ideally again , the younger you start these conversations, often the easier it is when a new developmental stage and situation occurs, as you already have a language and narrative related to it to fall back on.
We haven't talked about stranger danger for a long time in this work. We instead talk about 'safe adults'. And this is based on a child's understanding of their own sense of who and what feels safe to them. This is a learned skill.
The research in this strongly supports that children who have experience of and language to articulate their emotions, are often able to identified and express there unsafe feelings and are better able to set clear boundaries for themselves and others, including adults. Those children who struggle in this area are children, who have often been on the receiving end of mixed messages from the adults in their lives.
Overall Zues these conversations are not necessarily about the topic at hand, but more about skill development related to recognising emotions....what behaviours in others makes me feel comfortable or uncomfortable... what does boundary crossing feel like to me, what does my body feel when someone has crossed a boundary. What do I do with these feelings when they confuse me. What is a respectful way of saying no.
You have written on occasion about how you have handled your son's at times challenging behaviours and your have presented reasonable and considered parenting interventions to address these. I believe you will find a parenting response that sits with your values and parenting style.
Please too, as V said abuse does not see gender.
Also I am not sure why people think children are safer when women are in a home. I am all for minimising risks for children. But lets be clear women perpetrate all kinds of violence on children; I can assure you of that. Men are not our enemy here, adults that hurt children are.
