I am an advocate. I have spent so much of my time and energy focused on child protection, on bringing the unseen into the light and exposing the scale of abuse within the childcare sector – that I failed to notice something happening right under my own roof.
It had been months since I’d last done protective behaviours training with my own children. Months. I had bought several books on the topic, read them to my kids, marked them up, and put them on the shelf with every intention of sharing them here (including my own children’s book, which is currently in production).
Instead of rereading those books as I should. I was consumed by high-profile cases—the offenders (and alleged offenders) with over a 1000 offences between them who were brought down not by a parent, carer, or child, but by the Australian Federal Police. I was deep in the numbers, the timelines, the systemic failures, and the dark web investigations that uncovered them.
I was so busy fighting the bigger system that I stopped doing the one thing I had total authority over: sitting on floor in their bedroom at night and having child-sized conversations with my own sons.
Then I remembered an old quote by Sir Thomas Browne: “Charity begins at home.”
I decided to adapt it: Advocacy begins at home.
I cannot fix a broken regulator with my laptop and keyboard. I cannot expedite hard safety controls in blind spots like CCTV (excluding nappy change areas). But I can control the system inside my own house. In my home, I am the leader, I am the minister, the ECRU, the manager and the childcare educator.
I am their mother and my job is to be their leader and protector.
It is with this in mind that I share that four simple conversations at our family table interrupted an active grooming process at my child’s school and after-school program.
I want to be completely open with you: this is a police matter. I cannot reveal all the details, and to be honest, I am not sure how it will play out. As a psychologist who has written expert court reports, I know the grim reality. Police often struggle with child disclosures because what a child has the capacity to describe, and what a court requires for a conviction, are often two very different things.
This isn’t my first time facing this. When my child was about three I had to deal with another childcare investigation involving several children. Going through this trauma a second time is agonising. But I am not writing this to sound alarm bells or leave you feeling helpless.
I am writing this because, even in the middle of this nightmare, I feel deeply empowered.
Through these simple, everyday conversations, I protected my child. That is my number one job as a parent. If the legal system fails, if the police close the file, if their voice isn’t heard in court—I still did my fucking job.
My child came to me, they spoke, and I heard them and I interrupted the process.
In high school, I told my math teacher to fuck off. I never told anyone why I rebelled against him—that I had caught him looking up young girls’ skirts. I was suspended and in the aftermath of the outburst, my English teacher wrote me a letter with a quote: “To whom much is given, much is required.” It was a clever attempt to steer my behaviour, and at the time, I didn’t fully grasp the gravity of what that math teacher was doing, nor where that silent spark of defiance would lead.
Looking back, the strange synchronicity of that quote framing my life’s work today is not lost on me.
I have the psychology background, the court experience, and the lived reality of this trauma. It is my honour to pass this knowledge on to you, so you can protect your children.
Here is how those conversations started.
One share. One adult. One child safer.
The Four Conversations
I think subconsciously I had internalised the belief that grooming is too hidden, and that big cases are only ever caught by federal police, not families. I then thought I just needed to read the whole book and that was it, it was done. I think the problem is that as parents we often wait for the formal, sit-down ‘talk’ instead of taking the small, related moments right in front of us.
Full disclosure: two of the four conversations were actually started by my kids. They inspired me to create this new story telling system.
Conversation One: It was a Sunday morning during family breakfast. Cold toast on the table, the newspaper spread out. I was talking to my husband about targeted online advertising, how inappropriate content gets pushed toward young boys, and the people fighting to stop it. My kids interrupted and asked what we were talking about. Instead of brushing them off with “adult business,” I leaned in. I explained what the content was, why it was harmful, and why adults were trying to shut it down.
Conversation Two: I was watching a video on TikTok about consent parenting. A mother was describing a real scenario where a man—a firefighter—had groomed a young girl right in front of her parents. He drew love hearts next to her name, gave her special attention, showed her photos of his Labrador puppy, and then asked her to go to the bathroom with him. Everything he did looked innocent on the surface. That is the design.
I was explaining this video after dinner to my husband, and my child walked up mid-sentence and asked what we were talking about. Again, they initiated it. We talked about how harmless things can look, and then we talked about what could happen behind closed doors—the things that aren’t bad, and the things that are. I used plain, child-sized language to explain that some bad things might not feel bad at the time, which is precisely why children stay quiet.
From there, I asked direct questions (Conversations three and four):
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Do you feel safe at school?
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Do you feel safe at after-school care?
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Is there anything tricky you want to share?
And then I added the four most important words a parent can say: You won’t get in trouble.
That was the key. Children keep secrets because they worry they’ve agreed to something, that they are implicated, or that they will be punished. Removing that obstacle opened the door. Information came out about what was happening.
What Comes Next
We need to be the leaders in our children’s lives. We need to be their primary source of information, reaching them before someone else with a puppy, a pencil, or a friendly smile reaches them first.
Predators are not afraid to discuss sensitive information or topics with your child. Neither should you be.
I encourage you to hop on instagram follow some child education or protective behaviour advocates like myself (think consent parenting, nurtured first and @mshalyejones.writer) AND read the paper, talk about the news think about how to explain it in a child appropriate way.
Be their leader, be their trusted source of information. You are their child educator and their Minister of child safety.
This is my parental ministerial brief.
Moving forward, I am committing to publishing one story a month dedicated to protective behaviors and clinical insights. I want to give you practical, real-world tools so you can protect your children without raising them in fear. In each installment, I’ll share the exact content, news stories, or prompts I use, so you have something to start from on a Sunday morning instead of a blank table.
Bring your coffee and toast, biscuit and tea or whatever morning snack you need.
Let’s protect our kids together.
My next essay discusses how getting every carers name and creating a parents whatsapp group chat is what made this work.
Legal and Privacy Concerns. This work features literary and reflective essays expressing a subjective lived experience; it is not a legal or investigative record. This essay describes my own experience and my honest opinion. It concerns a matter currently before police, and no findings have been made. Hayley Jones is a pen name and my imagery is AI-generated, because my child’s matter is ongoing and I do not put our faces online. Some details have been changed to prevent identification. This is personal and advocacy writing, not clinical advice, and nothing here establishes a therapeutic relationship.
This piece began as a dictated account, was edited with AI assistance, and was then revised line by line by me.
Your voice belongs in this conversation.