- The memoir
The Signs We Miss
The signs of child abuse are easy to miss even for the person most trained to see them. The Signs We Miss is the story of a psychologist and mother who missed them in her own child, and turned that reckoning into a life’s work. Part memoir, part field guide to the warning signs parents are trained not to see.
Format
Trade paperback
Publication
Date to be confirmed
Publisher
To be confirmed
If your child came home upset and said someone 'hit me in the bottom,' red and irritated, what would you do to keep them safe?
- The opening question of The Signs We Miss
- 01
- About the book
A reckoning, and a field guide.
At first she struggles to recognise the signs, dismissing her own intuition and the subtle disclosures no parent wants to believe. As the truth unfolds and repeated reports are ignored by authorities, she draws on her expertise in trauma and forensic psychology to navigate a justice system ill-equipped to protect children.
The Signs We Miss exposes the hidden epidemic of child sexual abuse in daycare settings, and how systemic denial, flawed investigations, and misplaced institutional loyalty leave children unprotected while offenders remain free. Many alleged offences come to light only through unrelated investigations, not through the safeguarding systems built to catch them.
The book has grown beyond one family’s account. Drawing on interviews with other parents whose children’s signs were missed or dismissed in separate cases, Hayley brings a forensic psychologist’s eye to what these stories share: the signs, the moment of disclosure, and the point at which an adult failed to recognise what a child was showing them. Each account is included with identifying details changed or composited, building a pattern that no single case could show alone.
Justice, she comes to understand, rarely resides in courtrooms. It is found in awareness, advocacy, and the courage to keep speaking. The book is memoir and manifesto at once: intimate testimony alongside a call to account.
‘Children often lack the language to meet the criminal threshold, so their words, and their pain, go unheard.’
From The Signs We Miss
- 02
- Inside
What the book carries.
- The memoir
One family's story
The tension between professional expertise and maternal instinct, and what it is to miss the signs in your own child while trained to see them in others.
- The field guide
The signs, named
- The pattern
More than one child
- Hayley Jones
- Writer
- Psychologist
- Advocate
- 04
- The author
Standing on the same wound, twice.
Hayley Jones is the pen name of a psychologist and court appointed expert for Family Court matters, with lextensive experience supporting adult survivors of child abuse. She is a wife and mother of two boys, who directed her own psychology practice for fourteen years before stepping back to write.
She has practiced as a Nichiren Buddhist for close to twenty years, and developed professional development courses, approved by the Australian Psychological Society, that she delivered in Ubud. She writes under a pseudonym to protect her family. The Signs We Miss is her attempt to move the lesson forward in time, so that another parent meets it before the moment, and not after.
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