In 1995, I received my Masters Degree in Clinical Counseling. I am licensed in the State of Colorado as a practicing clinician. I have worked in the field of mental health treatment in Colorado for the past 11 years. My experiences include working with families, children, private practice mental health and general clinical psychology. I am accomplished in working with the family systems approach, adolescent treatment, as well as couples therapy.

I have worked with juvenile and adult male sexual offenders for a decade in private practice. I have sat in rooms occupied with sexual offenders. I have heard their stories and come to understand their patterns. I have listened to details about how a sexual offender 'prepares' to molest their victim over an extended period of time. I have concluded in my years of exposure to these offenders that they almost ALL had some sort of relationship with their victim prior to abusing. As a parent, this left me frightened and insecure about how to help my child. I became motivated to write Relative Danger as friends of mine as well as colleagues commented on the approaches I was taking with my own child. I wanted everyone to know about what I have learned. I decided to write a children's book so that children could begin from a very early age to utilize the strategies and techniques I have found so helpful in order to more realistically protect our children.

As part of my therapy with sexual offenders, I often get to be in contact with the offender's family members. I have come to see that even family members i.e. spouses, were unaware of the abuse that were being committed. These women and men have taught me how profound the secrecy and manipulation can be when a sexual offender abuses a child. I decided to write an accompanying adult book so that parents would better understand my motivations for teaching children.

I want other parents to benefit from my experiences and knowledge. The reality is that parents must accept risk in order to teach and encourage safety. I have been frightened by the number of perpetrations a sexual offender commits before ever being caught. With every perpetration, there is a new victim. In 11 years I have had only 2 sexual offender clients who had 1 victim. The rest of my clients have varied from having 4 to 100s of victims.

As a parent, I am no exception to the rule. EVERY child is at risk of being sexually violated and this reality is just as hard for me to accept as it is for other parents. We want to believe that we would never be friends with or relate to anyone that would hurt our children. But this is the critical point of what I have come to understand. The sexual offender is an EXPERT at secrecy and grooming. This is why so often on the news when we hear about a sexual offender who has been prominent in the community, sexually abusing a child, everyone's response is, "but he was so nice", or "everyone loved him". The sexual offenders whom I have come to meet, groom their victims and victim's families so extensively that everyone has come to TRUST him. This is what allows the offender's access to our children.

I have been in rooms with victims as they cry about being touched, being violated and being emotionally damaged by the trust they thought they had for the person who molested them. The statistics don't lie. Victims continue to be hurt and sexual offenders continue to exist in our community. My dream was to take the information given to me by sexual offenders and use it to get a message to parents. I teach the 4A's to all the parents with whom I have come into contact:

ADMIT: I know that sexual offenders exist in my community and my children are at risk.
ACCEPT: I don't know everything there is to know about sexual offenders and as a parent I alone cannot keep my child from becoming a victim of sexual abuse.
APPLY: I will seek out knowledge, correct information and hire a 'tutor', if necessary, in order to acquire information that can assist me in keeping my children safe.

I am excited about these books, as they are the first of their kind. I, like all parents have heard of Stranger Danger and felt certain that this term did little to help children when so often the offender lives in or near their home. My term RELATIVE DANGER better illustrates where the risk lies, closer than we often are willing to admit. We already know as parents not to let our children out of eyesight while in public places. We think that this will keep our children safe, and it might. It may keep our children less likely to be abducted, however, sexual offenders, the ones I have met do not lurk behind trees. My clients had ACCESS and OPPORTUNITY to the child, their victim, and therefore did not need to hide in a store because they already have the trust of their victim and even the victim's family.

I have used techniques discussed in both books with my child. She has been extremely interested in my messages and how she can relate them to her daily life. I want to assist parents in identifying the risk, the real risk, not our assumption about the risk or the media's version of the risk.

If just one parent chooses to read my books or attend a seminar, then potentially we have disabled one child from becoming a victim.

We CAN TEACH our children to assist us in keeping them safe.

I have taught my own child and I believe it can be done. My dream is for all parents to become so aware of the reality of sexual offenders that we act as buffers for or children.

My child is my love and there is nothing I wouldn't do to help, assist, guide, teach, support and PROTECT my child. We have to admit that we don't know everything and many times, for our child's well being, we will have to seek out knowledge so that we can help ourselves help our kids.

Erin Dolgan