I’m a psychologist turned child safety advocate after my son disclosed abuse at daycare. I write about the gaps in childcare safety, regulation and justice, and the signs parents are trained not to see. Evidence for parents, from a parent.
People keep telling me to stop reading about abuse because it’s too negative. Here’s why I won’t, and what looking has given me.
I am an advocate, and a lot of my week is spent looking at the worst things adults do to children. The Epstein files. The paedophile inquiry the Wood Royal Commission ran into NSW in the 1990s. Police data on how many sexual assault reports never go anywhere. And over the last few years, rejection after rejection from police in my own family’s matter.
People who care about me have gently suggested I stop. Stop reading it. Stop pulling the numbers. It’s all so negative, it can’t be good for you.
I understand why they say it. Some of what I read is sickening. When the NSW Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research tracked the sexual assaults reported to police in 2018, no legal action was taken in 85 per cent of them. Only 8 per cent of reported child sexual assaults ended in a proven charge.
But I don’t think looking is the problem. I think looking is how we work out what we want instead.
For a long time I wasn’t looking from a good place. I was looking from a place of anxiety, a need to control and a way to channel my anger and frustration.
I have been unwilling to let go of my PTSD. As a psychologist that probably sounds strange, but I saw it as adaptive. The hypervigilance helped me protect my children, and it has protected them. I was scared that if I desensitised myself and let go of the trauma I would let go of the very mechanism driving me to be protective.
My vigilance has also been used against me. Sometimes its been treated like a sort of violence. A word I chose, a question I ask, and suddenly I’m silently flagged as the anxious mother instead of the mother with a concern. I have learned to stand up and now refused to be shamed for being afraid when my child’s safety is at risk, and I stand by that. I have not always stood by that and I have been guilty of putting society’s expectations ahead of my own duty of care to my children.
What I’m learning now is that I might protect them even better from a place of confidence.
Changing Poison into Medicine: Turning News-Induced Anxiety into Action
Over twenty years I’ve been practising Nichiren Buddhism. I sit in front of the Gohonzon, focus on what I want to bring into the world, or the problem I have been struggling with and chant with the belief that I will get there. My biggest challenge has been keeping the faith when I hit obstacles. I started to realise that my resistance, fear or anger at what I saw as police incompetence or corruption was not in alignment with my belief and faith that things will work out.
In Nichiren Buddhism there’s a principle called hendoku iyaku, which translates as changing poison into medicine. It doesn’t ask you to avoid the hard thing, or to pretend it’s fine. It asks you to take what’s in front of you and transform it into something you can use.
You’ll find versions of this idea in a lot of places, from Buddhist teaching to the manifestation books on half my friends’ bedside tables. We need the dark times, the negative places, because that’s where we find out what we actually want and where we want to go. That’s how we evolve.
I think this is the challenge for those of us in advocacy, whether we’re an agency or one mum with a laptop. Sometimes we approach our work with a deep sense of urgency and need to be heard. But I realise that we need to walk away with more than knowledge, we need courage and hope.
So when I read about Bob Montgomery, a former president of the Australian Psychological Society who was jailed for child sex offences, I don’t read it to make myself sick.
I read it to get clear about what I think. I want a profession that checks. I want Family Courts that look closely at who is writing their reports. And I want parents who feel confident asking questions.
The Courage to Be Impolite: Taking Headlines and Applying Them in Real Life
If you take one thing away from The Protective Insight, I’d like it to be this: the courage to put your child’s safety ahead of your need to be polite.
Manners are eroding all over society. People don’t hold doors open the way they used to. Things you once couldn’t say or wear are everywhere. Bonnie Blue is filming herself having gang bangs packaged as female empowerment, young women walk the beach and the cafes alongside them in thongs, buttocks exposed.
Most of that happened without anyone deciding it should. I think this is one place we should erode our manners on purpose.
That means being comfortable saying no to sleepovers. Saying no to a male or female carer at daycare you don’t feel right about. We choose our own doctor, and our doctor’s gender, without any shame. We choose a psychologist for our child without any shame. Choosing who cares for our children should be no different (including their gender).
And it means walking into your child’s centre and asking:
Do you have CCTV in all the blind spots?
Are your male (or female) educators ever alone with a child? When are the children most at risk of being alone with a carer and how do you manage that risk?
What are your safety checks to make sure nothing happens?
Do you have a no-device policy for staff, and do you actually search staff bags?
Just go and have those conversations or send email enquiries. Don’t be shy. The good centres won’t mind, and the good businesses want to be asked the right questions.
This doesn’t have to come from fear. I’d love it to become par for the course, the way you’d ask whether a pool is fenced.
Start earlier than you think
As a society we’ve been conditioned to think sex is shameful and that all of it should be kept from children. These are very old ideas, and they don’t hold up against what our children are now being exposed to out there in person or online, through algorithms and through other children’s devices.
Years ago I read that we should have these conversations about exposure to online content including pornography and related material at around eight. I now think that’s far too late.
Stepping back to protective behaviours in general, my view, and that supported by the research is 12 months for basic protective behaviours and around two to four for more complex matters such as grooming, as soon as children can start to understand, particularly if they’re in daycare.
If your child is at home with you and never spends time alone with other kids, you could probably wait a little. But as soon as your child is out of your line of sight with another person, whether it’s a carer, in a public toilet, an older child or a friend at a sleepover, there’s a chance they’ll be exposed to something in person or on a device as pedophiles are using apps and games too, its not just schools.
I wrote recently about the four conversations at our breakfast table that changed things for my family. That’s what I mean. Small, child-sized talks, early and often.
Why I’m still here
It is easy to feel powerless when you read the headlines and see how often systems fail to protect children. I have felt that despair, and some days it still creeps in.
But noticing the problem is the first step toward fixing it. I want a culture that has the courage to look straight at the headlines and use that knowledge to build better defenses.
We need change everywhere: in academic research, in courtrooms, and in our daily routines. At pickup, at sleepovers, in short morning chats on the way to school, and across the front desk of childcare programs.
That is why I refuse to stop reading. That is why I am here.
One share. One parent. One child safer.
The Protective Insight is a publication about changing trauma into action, standing firm on boundaries, and keeping kids safe. Join parents and advocates.
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. 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. This is personal and advocacy writing, not clinical advice, and nothing here establishes a therapeutic relationship or professional opinion.
This piece began as a dictated account, was edited with AI assistance, and was then revised line by line by me.
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