The Minister will attend and present at the International Society for the Prevention of Child Abuse and Neglect (ISPCAN) Congress 2023, together with Professor Leah Bromfield, Australian Centre for Child Protection Director and Chair of the newly established South Australian Child Protection Expert Group.
The Minister will also meet with a range of stakeholders, government officials and experts, visiting child protection and family support and domestic violence programs and whole of community initiatives in Edinburgh, Glasgow and Leeds.
Some of the key stops include meetings with:
- Legislators and community organisations who worked to progress legislation to criminalise coercive control in Scotland and to ensure its effective implementation.
- Edinburgh Women's Aid's purpose built domestic and family violence refuge, which at any time can provide safe refuge to 29 women and their families.
- The Promise Scotland, aimed at supporting people and organisations in their efforts to ensure children with care experience grow up loved, safe and respected.
- Child Friendly Leeds, which has demonstrated world-leading progress in supporting vulnerable children and young people.
Experts from all over the world will gather for the ISPCAN Conference. Issues covered will include child death review models, innovative prevention programs, and strengthening domestic violence responses.
As put by Katrine Hildyard
I am determined to advance positive change with and for children and families through tackling the complex issues they face and encouraging whole of government, whole of community and whole of sector alignment of effort to help keep children safe, loved, nurtured and enabled to thrive.
There is innovative work being undertaken in Scotland and England across the child protection and family support system, and in the domestic violence space, and this gives us an opportunity to examine what we could do better and what we could adopt in the South Australian context.
I am very much looking forward to engaging in conversations about the difficult issues children and their families worldwide confront and how our responses could be adjusted and improved.
The ISPCAN Conference and our other meetings and visits will enable us to deeply focus on how we could do so, on how we could best advance change.
More than 80 per cent of child protection cases involve an element of domestic violence, and it's crucial to examine child abuse and neglect in the context of domestic violence. Scotland was a global leader in criminalising coercive control. Seven years on from doing so, they have an excellent perspective about best practice implementation of the legislation, how responders can be engaged and on how community can be part of this positive step forward in domestic violence prevention.
