Preventing Child Sexual Abuse Website & Guide

Monica will outline four case studies of families where child sexual abuse may have occurred and explore the mandatory reporting implications in each case.

Ms Kati Kraszlan was appointed the Western Australian Commissioner for Victims of Crime in August 2020.
Ms Kraszlan has spent many years in the Department of Justice, where she was part of the design and implementation of both the Drug Court and the Joondalup Family Violence Court, as well as developing the international award-winning West Kimberley Regional Prison.
While Acting Commissioner from 2017, Ms Kraszlan helped facilitate the State’s new family violence laws, delivered the National Redress Scheme in WA for victims of institutional child sexual abuse, helped develop a fund for the funerals of homicide victims, and the introduction of the State’s landmark ‘revenge porn’ laws. Ms Kraszlan says her priority is to help victims of crime navigate the complexity of the criminal justice system.

Carol Innes is currently a Co-Director in the Danjoo Koorliny Project – 2029 and Beyond, which is a long-term, Aboriginal-led systems change process based in the Centre for Social Impact at the University of Western Australia (UWA). Her previous role was the position of Manager Aboriginal Cultural Heritage & Arts at the Metropolitan Redevelopment Authority.; Landcorp & Development WA.
Her role was established to engage Noongar people involvement in the major developments of Yagan Square, Elizabeth Quay and the Scarborough Redevelopment.
Carol Innes has a strong commitment to work with our community across all sectors.

Jonathan has been a counsellor and psychotherapist for over twenty years. He has co-led several therapeutic and follow-up programmes for child pornography and other sex offenders and has been the convenor for the series of symposia on child sexual abuse prevention that have been held in Perth since March 2017.

Jonathan has been instrumental in setting up Western Australia’s professional training focusing on providing counsellors, psychotherapists and people working in other human resource fields with the skills needed to work specifically with sex offenders and their families.

In an ideal world, sexual traumatisation of children does not occur in the first place. Specifically, a person does not commit an assault and does not access or view CSAM. To get closer to this ideal, causer-related prevention is an essential pillar in keeping children safe.
“Causer-related prevention” is a type of prevention strategy that focuses on identifying and addressing the underlying factors or causes contributing to child sexual abuse. In the context of preventing child sexual abuse, causer-related prevention involves targeting the individuals or groups who are more likely to perpetrate such abuse, such as individuals with a sexual interest in children and offering an evidence-based preventive intervention.
This presentation shares a global perspective on the status of causer-related prevention of child sexual abuse and exploitation and shares updates from the established causer-related prevention interventions offered across Germany by the ‘Kein Täter werden’ network.

Stop it Now! is a child sexual abuse prevention program which offers an anonymous helpline and online resources for individuals concerned about their own or someone else’s sexual thoughts or behaviour towards children. It was originally introduced in the US by a Fran Henry, a victim-survivor of child sexual abuse, and has since been launched in the UK and Ireland, Netherlands and Belgium.
In 2020, Jesuit Social Services, in partnership with the University of Melbourne, was awarded philanthropic funding to develop and pilot Stop it Now! in an Australian context. The service launched on 1stSeptember 2022, and aims to build evidence of the feasibility of a Stop It Now! service in Australia. The presentation will provide an overview of the pilot to date including case studies and preliminary evaluation findings, as well as exploration of the next steps for scaling up the service.

The National Office for Child Safety leads implementation of Australia’s first National Strategy to Prevent and Respond to Child Sexual Abuse 2021-2030. This presentation will provide an update on work under the National Strategy since it was launched in October 2021.

The research was built on a New Zealand study (Julich, 2001), and was informed by Restorative Justice principles, with the aim of discovering the circumstances, if any, in which contact with the parent who had abused them, could help survivors of intrafamilial child sexual abuse to recover from the inherent relational trauma. Findings suggest that contact can aid recovery in several ways, but can also expose the survivor to further attack and criticism from the offending parent or others.
On balance, the majority of participants believed that their contact experience had helped more than hindered their recovery due to the reduction in fear and the benefit of “at least knowing where I stand”. When asked what else would have helped their recovery, participants articulated the need for more public education about the complexity of the intrafamilial child sexual abuse situation, more options for dealing with the crime, and access to unbiased non-judgmental professional help for all the family at disclosure.

Phoenix Support and Advocacy Service is a very small highly specialised service that has been supporting survivors of child sexual abuse that reside in metropolitan WA since 1978. Many years of listening to the experiences of the survivors, and to their non-offending family members and significant others impacted by a disclosure, has grown the organisation’s understanding and practice wisdom.
This presentation will give voice to the many survivors that have placed their trust in Phoenix to face their trauma and have shown the courage and resilience to undertake the journey of healing and recovery. Phoenix itself has had to survive many years of inadequate funding and uncertainty, and the organisation’s resilience is due to the passionate commitment of staff and members of the Board in preventing child sexual abuse and ensuring survivors are well supported. The presentation will also provide an overview of the Phoenix journey and the development of our Trauma Transformation program, our training arm, and our advocacy work.

The late 1980s saw the first treatment programme for adolescents with harmful sexual behaviour in New Zealand. The first wilderness-based therapy group nearly didn’t get off the ground due to the several boys nearly dying of exposure (thankfully this didn’t happen otherwise I might not be talking about this topic today!). What ensued for the next 15 years was intensive group-based wilderness therapy (with combinations of this around the country) using psychodrama and drama therapy, cognitive behaviour therapy in the real world and firmly embedded in a community-based family therapy programme.
The challenges of providing therapeutic programmes for Maori and pasifika will be discussed, finally rounding up with a discussion of the applicability (…or not….) of importing a residential therapeutic model from the United States, as well as where both therapeutic practice and research needs to head in the future.

How is justice to be served in cases of sexual violence? In recent decades, survivors have had that question addressed by policy makers and courts. Offenders have been punished more severely with the increased use of incarceration and lengthier sentences. But some survivors are not wholly satisfied by others making decisions on their behalf. Instead, they are looking to restorative justice to provide support to their recovery and likewise to offenders, families, and communities.
In this address, Dr. Anderson gives a personal account of her healing from sexual harm in an in-prison restorative justice program and an overview of her subsequent work as a scholar-practitioner of restorative justice programming for Anglo-Australian and Aboriginal peoples.

In the early days of the surfacing of a collective voice for Aboriginal Peoples, particularly led by women, in the late 70s and continuing through into the 1980s, there was a real push for a compassionate healing process for all Aboriginal people. This was particularly a push for a healing and supported change process for men. Men then began also to champion healing from family violence and sexual abuse. It has got somewhat lost in a maze of issues, but we need to come back to that as the punitive models have become dominant. That is particularly the case for sexual offenders. Prison treatment models for sex offenders are not effective in major part because they are devoid of family, culture and community context and input. There is no Aboriginal lead sexual abuse treatment for men in Australian community settings.
In a working lifetime as a Psychologist with these issues in diverse Aboriginal communities in WA, I know the treatment of our own people who have sexually offended is still the remotest and darkest corner of contemporary thought and planning for Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people. We can look at a case example where some successful healing/therapeutic change process in community has worked.
This isn’t an academic research or statistical presentation. In fact. it is the power of one. I have worked with many men, women and children in the nexus of family violence and sexual abuse. In presenting a sketch of a potential community based Aboriginal run service I maintain that it is also important to look at sexual abuse in the diverse Aboriginal communities as part of an ongoing wave of the violation from the initial colonisers. This is a huge sexual shadow and abusive sexual practices were unleashed on very disempowered Aboriginal peoples. Many of the colonisers saw Aboriginal women as their sexual slaves; whether it was on cattle stations or in towns. In many places they were used as comfort women. Children were prey to sex offenders right from the start of colonisation because they were often separated from their families as child labourers. There was often no protection for them. Then people of the Stolen Generation were pushed together in missions and others to reserves that had no real safety for men women and children. They already had this huge cycle of destructive sexual abuse happening within our own community and from without by white people.
The hardest truth for us to face is that there were Aboriginal sex offenders active in our own broken communities at least from the start of child removals. I have first-hand experience of working with some of these people. The enormity of challenges to therapeutic and healing change for our young men and men is something we really have to face. There is a sub-strata of sexual malaise and disempowerment, mixed with deep cultural distortions and dislocation in many communities that no program has addressed. We now know that there was a lot of trans-generational-trauma but we are less aware that that includes disturbances to child and adult sexuality. The wave goes on mixed with pornography and the dark sexual shadows of contemporary Eurasian societies.

Elizabeth Clemants will present her model, inspired by the restorative justice work of Derek Brookes, from ‘The Path to Healing from Harm’. This is the foundational model for healing all the colours, divided into two paths: 1) the path for healing from having been harmed, and 2) the path for healing from having caused harm. This model is presented in a linear fashion which makes it seem simpler than it is but also causes a powerful sense in the participants that it can be done.

Elizabeth Clemants will present the innovative theories behind the work of Hidden Water: a restorative justice response to child sexual abuse founded in New York City in 2013. When the ongoing harm of the reactions, actions and inactions of loved ones goes unaddressed, child sexual abuse and the reverberating consequences allows for families to fracture, breaking down the best chance of support and prevention.

Janice Paige is a psychologist in private practice and since 1999 has been working with individuals who have issues related to child sexual abuse. For many years, she worked at SafeCare with Christabel Chamarette and, since 2009, when SafeCare closed, she has also co-facilitated a therapeutic programme focused on Child Sexual Abuse and Internet Offending based on the SafeCare Method. She was founding committee member of the APS Interest Group on Child Sexual Abuse and a co-founder of the WA network.

Janice presented a paper at the Australian Childhood Foundation Trauma Conference in 2014 which was later selected for publication in a special issue of the Cambridge University Journal ‘Children Australia’.

Rebekah is the Head of the National Office for Child Safety, where she leads a team delivering national reforms to promote children’s wellbeing and protect them from harm, with a particular focus on child sexual abuse.
Rebekah has worked with the National Office since it was established in July 2018 as a result of the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse. Rebekah has significant Commonwealth public policy experience across a range of agencies where her work has focused on addressing issues which impact human rights and safety.

Georgia Naldrett is the Stop It Now! Australia Manager, where she applies her extensive knowledge of child protection and sexual offending to aid in the prevention of child sexual abuse. She is a psychology graduate with a BSc in Psychology and a MSc in Forensic Psychology fromthe University of Kent, UK. Georgia has been employed in a variety of psychology roles where she has developed her learning and application of rehabilitation and prevention.
During Georgia’s previous employment for The Lucy Faithfull Foundation/Stop It Now! UK she assisted in the implementation and delivery of secondary and tertiary prevention services to aid in the prevention of child sexual abuse. Georgia is passionate about research and advocacy, and is motivated to work collaboratively with multiple agencies to ensure a holistic approach to keeping children safe.

Isabel Schilg is a scientific associate and project manager with a multidisciplinary background. Following the completion of a Bachelor of Laws, Isabel developed skills in marketing, fundraising and operations in both the for-profit and non-profit sectors.
After working at Australia’s largest charity dedicated to preventing child sexual abuse, she joined the Institute of Sexology & Sexual Medicine at Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin to focus on causer-related prevention. In 2022, she completed a Masters of Criminology & Criminal Justice at Griffith University. Some of her active projects include capacity building initiatives for organisations worldwide that aim to prevent child sexual abuse through causer-related prevention, leading activities relating to stakeholder engagement, dissemination and project management in three EU funded projects (2PS, PROTECH and STOP-CSAM) and expanding the Institute’s online self-help program Troubled Desire.

Holly-ann is founder and Managing Director of Safe4Kids, with over 35 years’ experience in teaching child abuse prevention education. Holly has presented her thought-provoking Safe4Kids program in every State and territory of Australia, in the UK, USA, Cambodia, Indonesia, Mexico and Qatar and at over 30 conferences.
Holly-ann has also taught her Protective Education Program in 86 remote communities around Australia, which has given her a unique insight into the dangers facing Aboriginal Communities.

Louise Lamont has worked in the areas of family and domestic violence, child sexual abuse, sexual assault, and family law for more than 30 years in the community services sector and in State and Federal Government. Her experience is broad having worked originally as a clinician with survivors and perpetrators and since then she has developed policy and practice, delivered training to allied professionals and the judiciary, provided clinical supervision, acted as community education campaign advisor, authored various publications related to best practice, and been a passionate advocate for criminal justice reform and the needs of survivors through her representations to Government and through her contribution to many local, state, and national committees and conferences. Louise is currently CEO and clinical manager at Phoenix Support and Advocacy Service.

Jane Anderson is a social anthropologist and Adjunct Research Fellow at the University of Western Australia. She has undertaken and published research on the relationship between religion and the state, religious movements, sexuality and gender, child sexual abuse, restorative justice and peer support work.
Jane has worked voluntarily with Anglo-Australian and Noongar groups to design and deliver restorative and peer responses to pressing local needs. Her work is influenced strongly by a lived experience of the margins, and a determination to bring about a more just, kinder and fairer world.

Prior to embarking on a degree in psychology, I worked as a comprehensive nurse in acute psychiatric and surgical nursing in Dunedin, Auckland and Sydney. Nursing taught me many practical and ‘coal face’ skills and provided a great foundation for my next career as a clinical psychologist. I have an undergraduate degree in psychology from Otago University and trained in clinical psychology at the University of Auckland. Upon registration as a clinical psychologist, I worked intensively with adolescents with harmful sexual behaviours and children with conduct problems for over 10 years, prior to joining the clinical psychology programme as a staff member. Much of this work involved outdoor wilderness therapy and family therapy.

Darrell was born in Noongar Ballardong country in Northam WA; bringing together Aboriginal, English and Danish ancestry.
He is the son of Matilda May Anderson who was one of the Stolen Generations. Her real name was a Western Australian desert name, something like ‘Tribbie’. She was removed as a baby from her mother Norah Skipper, who was a 13 years old, blind Aboriginal woman residing in a mining camp with a European miner called Hans Anderson. Tribbie was taken soon after birth, to Moore River mission, where she was called ‘Trilby’ – an English hat. Later in childhood she was taken to Sister Kates Children’s home in Queens Park, Perth – where she was named ‘Tilly’. To get a marriage license she called herself Matilda and with help got a birth certificate.

The Hon Mark Dreyfus KC MP was appointed Commonwealth Attorney-General and Cabinet Secretary on 1 June 2022.
Mark passionately believes in the rule of law, access to justice and freedom of the press, and is a longstanding advocate of a national anti-corruption commission.
He was first elected as the Member for Isaacs in November 2007.
Before entering Parliament, Mark was a barrister who appeared in a number of landmark cases in the High Court of Australia, including the Stolen Generations case.

His Excellency the Honourable Chris Dawson AC APM was sworn in as the 34th Governor of Western Australia on 15 July 2022.
The Dawson family have been part of the early colonial settlers over five generations of farming and law enforcement. The Governor’s great-great-grandparents arrived in the then Swan River colony in Western Australia in 1830.
Chris Dawson AC APM was educated at Perth Modern School before joining the Western Australia Police Force in 1976, going on to provide 46 years of service in Australian law enforcement.
He served in country and metropolitan positions, criminal investigation, training and senior roles.

Christabel is a registered Clinical Psychologist with over 50 years experience in the treatment of violence and sexual problems and adult victims of child sexual abuse. She was Clinical Director of SafeCare Incorporated between 1997-2009, an expert consultant to the Ministry of Justice and member of the WA Parole Board from 2002-2006 and a member of the WA Board of Professional Standards of the Anglican Church from 1997-2015. She is currently in private practice, a single expert witness appointed by the Family Court of Western Australia, and Postgraduate Psychiatry lecturer on child sexual abuse. Since 2010 she has co-facilitated a community-based treatment program for child sexual offending and internet pornography based on the SafeCare Method.

Cathcart’s presentation will provide a summary of the mandatory reporting laws across Australia including: definitions of who is a child, threshold test for reporting abuse, who must report and other relevant laws.

Chris’ presentation will consider primary professional duties to report under State and Commonwealth legislation, and the interface between professionals engaged in a therapeutic role with individuals and families and other professions dealing with child abuse. The context of both legislative requirements, policing powers and methods and the rights of victims and accused persons are considered. Discussion will be invited on the underlying (and sometimes competing) values that inform the various professions and courts and other organisations involved in child protection, with a view to helping practitioners clarify their own responsibilities.

It will be an interactive session where we work through a few practical examples of day-to-day dilemmas and invite other examples for discussion purposes.

Mandatory reporting has significantly increased the number of substantiated child sexual abuse cases in Western Australia but that increase has come at both financial and human costs. Rosemary’s presentation explores the nature of those costs using Australian and international research. Consideration is given to ways in which the costs might be lessened and the benefit of increased substantiation enhanced.

Christabel’s presentation covers definitions of child sexual abuse, an overview of normal childhood sexual development and the importance of a public health approach which upholds the safety and best interests of the child.

Christabel’s presentation will focus on the Primacy of the Best Interests of the Child and adopting a public Health approach to working with families where child sexual abuse is an issue. The presentation will include: how do we measure what is in the best interest of the child, protecting them from abuse, healing of trauma, restoration of healthy relationships, meaningful consultation with children and families, being child focussed in our approach and offering treatment and support to families?

Toni’s presentation will outline the legal process, both the process if someone in the family is charged with a criminal offence and the child protection process. She will discuss the questions of protective bail conditions, safety planning, risk assessment and other legal issues families need to understand when they are involved in these processes and the support they are likely to need as a result of being involved in legal processes.

Toni is principal lawyer in her own private practice – Iola Law specialising in domestic violence, Family Court and Children’s Court matters.

Until 2022, Toni worked as a senior lawyer with the Department of Communities in the Child Protection Legal Unit where she worked for 8 years. She has also worked with the Aboriginal Legal Service, in child protection in the UK and now represents parents, foster carers, children and, at times, government departments in various cases in the Family Law arena. All in all she over 20 years’ experience working in cases where sexual abuse has been alleged. Toni is married with two daughters.

Dr Rosemary Cant is a registered psychologist and adjunct researcher with the school of Allied Health, University of Western Australia. As an independent researcher, she has undertaken significant evaluations and reviews of government programs. For over a decade Dr Cant was an expert advisor to the Western Australian Working with Children Screening Unit and was called as an expert witness on a number of occasions.

She has also been a member of the Western Australian child protection agency’s Child Death Review Committee and Case Review Board. Dr Cant has been engaged as an expert witness in child maltreatment in civil litigation matters.

Rosemary is Secretary on the SafeCare Board.

Commencing in the legal profession in 1990, Chris has worked for Legal Aid WA, a Community Legal Centre and two private firms before commencing his own practice in 2004. Chris’ primary roles are now in family law & mediation; however he has experience in criminal and civil litigation.

Before becoming a lawyer Chris was employed in the construction industry and the WA Department for Community Welfare/Services.

Chris has a long association with SafeCare and, currently, is the Chair of the SafeCare Board.

Born and raised in Tasmania, Cathcart moved to Western Australia in early 1992. He has worked in a wide range of senior management and leadership roles in politics, the community services and arts sectors including: Personal Adviser to then Greens WA Senator Christabel Chamarette, Executive Director of the Community Housing Coalition of WA and General Manager of the Spare Parts Puppet Theatre.
He has served on a number of boards and committees including: Chairperson of the Community Housing Federation of Australia, member on WA State Homelessness Task Force in 2001, a member of the Board of the WA Council of Social Service, Board member of the Chamber of Arts and Culture WA and Deputy Chair of Healthway.

Diana has been working with parents and families in various settings since 1998. Diana coordinated a parenting home visiting service for a number of years, has worked as a Senior Therapist for a period of time and since 2008 has been working as a co-facilitator initially as part of the SafeCare’s services and then within Christabel Chamarette’s Child Sexual Abuse and Internet Offending Group Treatment program based on the SafeCare Method, as well as the Men’s Follow Up group.

Since 2014 Diana has also been working as an advocate for families who have found themselves having to navigate the children protection system.

Janice Paige is a psychologist in private practice and since 1999 has been working with individuals who have issues related to child sexual abuse. For many years, she worked at SafeCare with Christabel Chamarette and, since 2009, when SafeCare closed, she has also co-facilitated a therapeutic programme focused on Child Sexual Abuse and Internet Offending based on the SafeCare Method. She was founding committee member of the APS Interest Group on Child Sexual Abuse and a co-founder of the WA network.

Janice presented a paper at the Australian Childhood Foundation Trauma Conference in 2014 which was later selected for publication in a special issue of the Cambridge University Journal ‘Children Australia’.

Monica is a Counselling Psychologist with more than 25 years of experience in the field including specialist work in the area of trauma and sexual abuse; with victims as well as perpetrators and other family members. Monica has a Master of Psychology from Curtin University and completed a placement at SafeCare in 2005 where her interest in the area of sexual abuse work began. After that she worked for SafeCare in their Bunbury office and also in private practice. She has coordinated a counselling service for Road Trauma WA, been the clinical lead of psychology at Telethon Speech and Hearing and worked in both Government and non-Government settings. Monica has additional qualifications in clinical hypnosis, EMDR and trauma and grief counselling.

After a 20-year career in the Australian Navy, Rick went to university and obtained his degree in psychology. He started working in the prison system and stayed for 10 years, where he gained experience in treating depression, anxiety, trauma – both recent and from childhood – as well as assessing clients at risk of self-harm and contributing to their management plan. Rick has worked with a wide variety of clients including indigenous people, military veterans, police and first responders, and clients with mental health diagnosis such as schizophrenia and borderline personality disorder. In addition, Rick became a trained facilitator of therapeutic and psycho-educational group programs, including being an accredited facilitator of the Gatekeeper suicide awareness program.

Jonathan has been a counsellor and psychotherapist for over twenty years. He has co-led several therapeutic and follow-up programmes for child pornography and other sex offenders and has been the convenor for the series of symposia on child sexual abuse prevention that have been held in Perth since March 2017.

Jonathan has been instrumental in setting up Western Australia’s professional training focusing on providing counsellors, psychotherapists and people working in other human resource fields with the skills needed to work specifically with sex offenders and their families.

Christabel is a registered Clinical Psychologist with over 50 years experience in the treatment of violence and sexual problems and adult victims of child sexual abuse. She was Clinical Director of SafeCare Incorporated between 1997-2009, an expert consultant to the Ministry of Justice and member of the WA Parole Board from 2002-2006 and a member of the WA Board of Professional Standards of the Anglican Church from 1997-2015. She is currently in private practice, a single expert witness appointed by the Family Court of Western Australia, and Postgraduate Psychiatry lecturer on child sexual abuse. Since 2010 she has co-facilitated a community-based treatment program for child sexual offending and internet pornography based on the SafeCare Method.