The Pennsylvania Association for Rational Sexual Offense Laws is proud to support the National Sexual Violence Resource Center’s Sexual Assault Awareness Month this April 2025.
This year’s theme “Together We Act, United We Change” highlights the importance of working together to address and prevent sexual abuse, assault, and harassment. This campaign focuses on enhancing public understanding of sexual violence, amplifying the voices of survivors, and empowering us to work together to promote the safety and well-being of others. Everyone in our communities deserves to live in safe and supportive environments where they are treated with respect. When our workplaces, schools, and communities work together to uphold safety and respect, we make progress in preventing sexual abuse, assault, and harassment.
Part of PARSOL’s credo is “All sexual violence and abuse is unacceptable.” While we fight for rational, evidence-based consequences for individuals who cause sexual harm, we also believe that prevention of sexual harm begins with primary prevention. Pennsylvania has adopted significant tertiary prevention — that is preventing additional harm after it has occurred. This Sexual Assault Awareness Month we encourage all Pennsylvanians to join us in advocating for safer communities by shifting priorities from ineffective policies toward preventing harm before it happens.
Education is the first step to action, empowering our communities to be part of the solution. This campaign works to shift the ways our communities understand, talk about, and respond to sexual abuse, assault, and harassment. We can challenge harmful misconceptions and foster safer communities by learning and acting together.
At PARSOL we lean on the principles of restorative justice – an approach to justice that focuses on repairing the harm caused, emphasizing accountability, forgiveness, and healing for all parties involved.
Together, we act with purpose! United, we have the power to change the world for the better.
Understanding Sexual Abuse, Assault, and Harassment
Sexual violence impacts everyone. Anyone can be a victim of sexual violence, and people who commit sexual abuse, assault, and harassment exist in all of our communities. This underscores why it’s important for all of us to care about sexual violence and take steps to promote the safety and well-being of others.
Sexual violence is an umbrella term that includes any type of unwanted sexual contact — including sexual abuse, assault, and harassment.
Forms of sexual violence include:
- Rape or sexual assault
- Sexual harassment
- Sexual abuse
- Unwanted sexual contact/touching
- Sexual exploitation and trafficking,
- Exposing one’s genitals or naked body to others without consent,
- Nonconsensual image sharing and/or coercion (including AI-generated imagery)
- Words and actions of a sexual nature against a person’s will and without their consent
Statistics show:
- Over 53% of women and over 29% of men reported experiencing contact sexual violence.
- More than 1 and 4 non-Hispanic Black women (29%) in the United States were raped in their lifetime.
- 32.9% of adults with intellectual disabilities have experienced sexual violence.
- 93% of child sexual abuse is perpetrated by individuals already known to the victim, not a stranger.
Actions You Can Take Today
- Understand that sexual harm is preventable, not inevitable.
- Improve skills around asking for consent and respecting the answer, challenge jokes that demean others, and maintain and model healthy relationships.
- Encourage children to respect others’ boundaries and bodies, challenge unfair gender stereotypes, and treat others with respect.
- Improve policies and practices within faith communities, community organizations, workplaces, and schools to ensure everyone is treated fairly. Screen staff and volunteers and train them frequently on healthy behavior and boundaries.
- Create and pass legislation that supports survivors and improves equitable resources.
Prevention of Child Sexual Abuse
- Child sexual abuse is perhaps the most stigmatized topic in human society.
- Many of us will in some way have been touched by harm. It is no wonder that as a society we struggle to discuss the topic. It carries pain. All too often, abuse is ignored, avoided, or dismissed. Fatalism also hinders our ability to act.
- But to prevent it, we must understand how it happens. Talking about the reality of abuse matters and talking about it means elevating survivor voices, demanding political leadership, and making the case for large-scale prevention.
- Three decades of a false narrative around policies aimed to protect have given a false sense of security, but reality shows the opposite is true. According to a March 2025 Report from the Sex Offense Litigation and Policy Resource Center at Mitchell Hamline School of Law, “The modern sex offense registry was borne out of the belief that a public registry listing people who had been convicted of a sex offense would make communities safer. That premise was wrong. We now have thirty years of data concluding that public registries do not work as intended—in fact, there is evidence that public registries actually increase registrant recidivism. Furthermore, there is no definitive evidence that these laws deter non-registrants from sexually offending. At the same time, sex offense registration and notification (SORN) laws contribute to the stigmatization of registrants, which make securing employment and housing more challenging, and disrupt or preclude the maintenance of strong social ties. Registrants’ families also experience significant hardships. SORN laws should be abandoned, and resources should instead be invested in evidence-based interventions to address sexual violence that are currently starved for resources.” To this end, we need to reallocate the $8 million+ in taxpayer dollars that fund the Pennsylvania Megan’s Law registry and allocate it to primary prevention.
Legislative Actions
- Write to your Pennsylvania State Representative and ask them to co-sponsor 2025 HB460 by State Rep. Mary Jo Daley – Age Appropriate Curriculums to Prevent Child Abuse