When is a child’s sexualised behaviour age-appropriate and when is it something we need to interrupt?

In Australia, the term used to describe sexualised behaviours between children that are inappropriate or problematic is Harmful Sexualised Behaviours (HSB).

For some adults, certain behaviours wou...

I received a message recently that made me think about all the times when I was still in the Police and I felt like protecting kids was an impossible task and being a Police Officer didn't help anyone. 

I had many days where I I felt that what I was doing didn't matter. If I'm honest, I still have da...

Recent cases involving female educators and carers have understandably shaken people and forced many of us to re-examine assumptions about who we trust with our children.

Not because abuse by a female perpetrator is new - but because when a woman, particularly a trusted adult such as a teacher, har...

After years working as a detective with children who had been abused, I started noticing something. 

It wasn't obvious at first but as time went on, certain conditions became consistently apparent. 

Different families. Different ages. Different settings. Different offenders. 
Some cases were adult-...

It’s one of the hardest things for a parent or carer to wrap their head around, witnessing a child display sexualised behaviours towards another child. The instinct is to minimise, to explain it away with a nervous laugh and say, “They’re just curious,” or “It’s normal at that age.”

But here’s the ...

It’s the scenario no one ever wants to imagine—but far too many live through.

You start to notice something off in your child - behaviours that don’t make sense, disclosures that chill you to the bone, a gut instinct that won’t leave you alone. Then it hits you like a freight train: the person harm...

I recently spoke with a mother who reached out to me because her 5-year-old child had disclosed sexual abuse - not from an adult, but from another 5-year-old child.

Let’s just pause there.

Because this is the part no one warns you about.

No one tells you what to do when the harm doesn't come from...

I remember when I was returning to work after my daughter was born and the emotional roller coaster I went through in finding an early childhood centre. I had so much mum-guilt in needing to put her into childcare that I cried for days.

At that stage, I was not even a police officer, I was just nee...

I grew up in a blended family. My parents separated when I was a young child and I grew up with step-parents.

With that being said, there was a lot less blended families when I was growing up than there is now. Blended families are a much more normal family structure than when I was younger and the...

A child that does NOT feel safe will not disclose abuse.

At times I think we forget this FACT in our goals to protect and help kids. 

As a specialist child interviewer, I was very aware that the time and process prior to the child's interview was equally, if not more important than the actual inte...

TRIGGER WARNING - THIS BLOG POST CONTAINS THE DISCUSSION OF CHILD ABUSE MATERIAL! 

I had a young person contact me yesterday asking for HELP. 

The young person had been shared a link to a website in which they were pressured to open and look at on insistence from 'friends'. 

The website contained...