I thought this conversation was great until the downvote happened. So far, the opinions that have been expressed here are pretty good, it got even better when someone that had actually been abused started to share their experiences. Using the combined intelligence of the posters plus the unique perspective and experience of the poster that was abused, I'm sure an intelligent conclusion could have been reached.

The downvote clearly shows that someone here is lacking maturity. Downvoting because you don't like what was said is mindless censorship.

Also, I like your point about emotional investment. I am way too emotionally invested when it comes to drink driving. I lost both parents to a drunk driver and I would happily see hanged any drink driver. This is an emotional response rather than a logical one and this is why people with too much emotional investment shouldn't make the rules. Their input is definitely needed though.

To be clear, I did not downvote and indeed could not because you cannot downvote direct replies.

My guess as to the reason for the downvote is that once he veered into making personal comments on my state of mind, he was engaged in ad hominem. No matter how good or bad his points, that behavior is discouraged.

On whether I am too emotionally invested, if my points had been imbued with excessive emotion, that would have been one thing. But they were not. My big point was, "This potentially addresses a real problem in trying to reach abused children, and we should collect data on whether it actually works." I believe that to be a fairly neutral point.

Once we have data, we can revisit this with information of the form, "We had 5 complaints and 2 children called our hotline because of a sign that was seen fairly regularly by an estimated 1000 children." At that point we can try to find a balance between people who had a mildly unpleasant conversation with their children, and children who no longer have absolutely horrible things happening to them.

But until we have that data, we can't productively have those conversations. Clearly abuse is orders of magnitude worse than being confronted with an unpleasant and possibly confusing sign. Clearly more normal children are going to be confronting that sign than are going to see abuse stopped. How do these opposing interest balance? Nobody can tell because we don't know what portion of people who see the sign are disturbed by it, and we don't know how many abused children will actually respond to it.

So we should run the experiment and collect data.

Sorry to be blunt, but you fail at logic.

You have a theory about my behavior that might or might not be correct. You have extrapolated that to a theory about all abused children that is even less likely to be correct than the first. You have concluded from that that you see no point in actually trying the experiment and collecting data because it is guaranteed to fail.

Your initial theory about me is incorrect. After years of abuse I got to that point, sure. But I didn't start there. I believe from my own memories of myself that there was a period where I would be willing to try it, and a period where I wouldn't.

Your generalization of my experience (which you weren't there for and know almost nothing about) is even less correct than your initial theory. I was but one child with one set of experiences. Different children react differently. Different children go through different patterns of abuse. My description is anecdote, not data.

And finally your absolute certainty that it is useless to even try is nothing short of absolutely galling. On what evidence do you give up before trying? I've got a heck of a lot more experience/knowledge than you do, and I certainly don't think it is hopeless to try this! (I don't necessarily think it will work, but it seems like a promising idea.)

As for the message itself, well, I am not in a position to judge. Ideally it was crafted with input from people who had suffered the exact kind of abuse they are targeting about what would have been most likely to work for them. I know that the most effective messages are often not what someone without experience would guess them to be. They've got more knowledge about physical abuse than I do.

My experience was sexual abuse, which is different in many ways. But if it shows any signs of effectiveness for one then it can be repeated with messages aimed at other kinds of victims.

For sexual abuse I might suggest a message along the lines of, He says you asked for it, and it sometimes feels good. But it is wrong and you don't want it. We understand. We can make it stop.

Why that message? Because the best way to show you actually understand is to state the deepest, darkest truth of sexual abuse. Which is that abusers try to convince themselves and their victims that this is an act of love, and children are not equipped with the emotional maturity to distinguish "this feels good" from "I want this".

(That message might be a bit too raw. I've known a lot of adults who were unable to look back at their own abuse and face that statement. And explaining it to your kids would be extremely hard. But it is a statistical certainty that they will have kids in their classrooms who are actually GOING through that, but nobody knows it...)

Continuing the theme.

You were sufficiently unaware of the ways in which abusers try to control victims that you failed to understand the purpose of the sign.

When the way in which the design of the sign is meant to bypass the dynamics of abuse was described to you, you leaped to the conclusion that abusers are going to succeed in controlling victims, so there is no point to even trying something like this sign.

When I pointed out that the fact that abusers try to control victims does not mean that they necessarily succeed, and it is worth trying the sign out to see if it successfully reaches some victims, you concluded that I'm too emotionally invested to have a rational conversation.

Returning your bluntness in kind, on this topic, you are sufficiently uninformed that you can't have an opinion worth respecting. Your only choices are A) inform yourself, B) shut up, or C) be an asshole.

I'm sorry that you've chosen option C, and see no point in continuing this conversation.