New training on understanding, preventing and responding to harmful sexual behaviours amongst children will be available to foster and kinship carers in SA and will be launched at an all-important forum on harmful sexual behaviours amongst children being held in Adelaide tonight.
Hosted by Healthy Development Adelaide with research partly funded by the Malinauskas Government, the forum will hear from experts in the field including 2025 Australian of the Year for SA and Director of Australian Centre for Child Protection (ACCP), Professor Leah Bromfield on ways to tackle this complex and confronting issue impacting our precious children and young people.
Following this forum, approximately 3000 foster and kinship carers will also have access to a suite of online training developed by the ACCP, to help them understand, prevent and respond to these harmful sexual behaviours.
Harmful sexual behaviours displayed by children and young people fall outside what is considered developmentally and socially appropriate. They may include force or coercion, and cause harm to the children themselves, along with others.
Experience, skills and training can help frontline workers and carers recognise and understand a range of harmful sexual behaviours and know how to respond and where to seek help.
The Malinauskas Government is determined to transform the child protection and family support system and is deep in the process of doing so. As part of our significant reform efforts, it is crucial that we help prevent and respond to this form of child sexual abuse.
Harmful sexual behaviours in children and young people must be recognised and urgently treated as a specific area of concern through co-ordinated efforts that shift children's understanding of what is respectful and appropriate and grow broader community awareness of this issue.
The State Government's funding for vital research, in partnership with the WA Government, being undertaken by the Australian Centre for Child Protection on this issue, is another important step forward to tackling harmful sexual behaviours amongst children and young people. It is part of a research partnership to better understand the causes, effects, prevention and therapeutic responses for harmful sexual behaviours.
As put by Katrine Hildyard
The fact that Australia's fastest growing form of child sexual abuse is that between children is deeply troubling and a call to action to tackle it and its underlying drivers - outdated gender norms, harmful, misogynist attitudes toward women being spread online and a prevalence of violent pornography targeted toward very young children.
Tackling this scourge is of paramount importance to this Government and why we have invested in the ACCP's groundbreaking research in this area.
The Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse highlighted how harmful sexual behaviours significantly contribute to child sexual abuse.
To prevent and respond to this form of child sexual abuse, harmful sexual behaviours in children and young people must be recognised and specifically tackled through co-ordinated effort that shifts children's understanding of what is respectful and appropriate.
A vital part of that effort is giving our generous foster and kinship carers tools to grow their understanding of these behaviours and their causes and their confidence to respond. That is exactly what tonight's forum and the training is all about.
As put by Australian Centre for Child Protection Director Professor Leah Bromfield
About half of all child sexual abuse today is caused by other children.
Our children today are growing up in a different world to the world many of us grew up in, particularly with the rise of the internet and the way that's changing what kids are thinking is normal and appropriate.
Violent pornography, the pushing of toxic masculinity online, and a throwback to old gender roles – that's all creating conditions for harmful sexual behaviours by children to rapidly increase.
It's really important for us as adults to understand these issues, how we can recognise these behaviours and what to do when we're worried about a child or young person's behaviours.
