If you take me, for example, I took so long to tell anybody. I always tried to deal with it myself and it caused me years and years of anxiety and depression, which still to this day I have to deal with. I still have trouble communicating with people and actually going out in the world, like leaving my room and being out in real life because of what happened and because I tried to deal with it all by myself.
I would tell them to talk to somebody they trust. If they feel like they can't tell their mother or their father, maybe there's an aunt or an uncle or another person, like a principal or a counsellor at school, just anybody. I waited until two days before the article came out to even tell my family what was going on. For all those years, they never knew what was happening. They were a little upset, of course, at first, but once they realized that all their previous assumptions as to why I was ditching school, why I was having mental health episodes, why I had tried to kill myself, why I had turned to drugs, that all of that was based on just, you know.... They had no idea what was really going on.
I would tell them to really let somebody know. It's not going to help just dealing with it on their own.