I’ve spent most of this year writing about things I have very little control over. Child care regulation, quality standards, the gaps between what a policy document says and what actually happens on a centre floor. That work matters.
It’s the only way the system will ever be held to account but we need to be realistic about timeframes for change in this industry. The Royal Commission into institutional abuse handed down its final report in 2017. Late last year 1200 children were asked to do STD tests, yet here we are nearly twelve months on, another predator caught by the AFP and we are still arguing about the basics.
Your child is two now. By the time some of this reform lands, she won’t be a toddler anymore.
This week I want to write about that which we can control as parents, today. The part that does not need a minister’s signature to sign off. Conversations you can have today, in the bath, in the car, as you put your child to sleep. Because if you have to send your child to one of these places, and most of us do, or even if you don’t and it’s just family and neighbours and a mate’s house on a Saturday, there’s work that belongs to us parents and not to them.
start with these two things
Protective Behaviours are built on two truths, and they’ve barely changed in forty years.
Everyone has the right to feel safe all of the time. And nothing is so awful, or so small, that we can’t talk about it with someone we trust.
Those are the two things underneath everything else. Private parts, safe and unsafe touch, early warning signs, the helping hand of trusted adults, the difference between a surprise and a secret.
you don’t have to make this up
You don’t have to invent this. Society has spent thirty years working out the language so you don’t have to freeze and stumble mid sentence.
Everyone’s Got a Bottom by Tess Rowley, illustrated by Jodi Edwards, originally published by Family Planning Queensland. It’s the first one I’d put in the house. Correct names for body parts, public and private, said in a tone that’s light instead of frightening. Suitable for ages three to eight.
Some Secrets Should Never Be Kept by Jayneen Sanders. This is the one that does secrets, which is the one that matters most for what I’m about to describe. Sanders also wrote My Body! What I Say Goes!, and a parents’ guide called Body Safety Education if you want the adult version first, which a lot of parents need.
Sanders Little BIG Chats series was picked up by the National Office for Child Safety, and you can watch her read five of them for free on the childsafety.gov.au site. Private Parts are Private. Secrets and Surprises. My Early Warning Signs. Consent. My Safety Network. These resources are high quality and free.
Based in Perth, eSafeKids is a social enterprise founded by Kayelene Kerr. She runs workshops, who runs workshops endorsed by the safety commissioner educate parents about protecting children from in person and online harm. ESafeKids stocks most of the good protective behaviour titles in one place.
consent comes later
When you’re teaching a child to say stop it, I don’t like it, or to protect their private parts, you’re teaching them to respond to something that’s happening.
This is essential, children need to know the basicas like touching their private parts is not ok and its our job as parents to explain this too them. Teaching them assertiveness is protective. The tricky part of the equation is that a groomed child doesn’t feel unsafe, which is the entire design of grooming.
The whole point of the flattery and the special treatment and the small tests is to arrive at the moment when the child’s early warning signs never fire, because the person doing this is someone they like, doing something they have already deemed ok and in a way that implicates the child in the process.
Anne-Marie McAlinden’s definition, the one the Royal Commission adopted, describes grooming as manipulative techniques used to establish trust or normalise sexually harmful behaviour, with the aim of enabling exploitation and preventing disclosure.
Keeping a child from telling is part of what grooming is trying to achieve. It’s built into it from the beginning.
In order to protect our children, to cover protective behaviours effectively, the lesson has to land earlier than consent. It has to land on the tricks themselves.
The flattery. You’re my favourite. Being shown things in a tricky way. And the test, which is always, always about secrets. Don’t tell anyone?
keep talking about it
Here’s the principle I think all parent’s should have as a screen saver.
Small conversations, and lots of them.
Not one talk. Not the talk. Not a solemn sit-down where you make eye contact and use your serious voice and the child correctly reads the whole thing as very serious and naughty and gets frightened and never wants to bring the topic too you in case they get in trouble.
The National Office for Child Safety built an entire national campaign on this, called One Talk at a Time. It came out of the Royal Commission and sits under the National Strategy, and the whole premise is that these have to be ongoing and proactive rather than one-off. Here in WA, the Health Department’s parent guide has been called Talk Soon. Talk Often. for years.
Once a month, minimum. Ten minutees, In the car can be good because nobody has to look at anybody.
And the way in is a sentence stem. Mine is: what would happen if?
Not what would you do., though I do use that one too. I ask what would happen if. It moves the whole thing off the child and onto the situation, which means they’re solving a puzzle instead of being tested.
here’s one I tried this week
What would happen if you were at someone’s house, and some kids were looking at a phone, and it showed people with no clothes on, showing their private parts. And someone said don’t tell anyone, you’ll get in trouble.
What would happen then?
I’m doing this one now, deliberately, because this is the shape it actually takes. eSafety issued legally enforceable transparency notices to Roblox, Minecraft, Fortnite and Steam this year over grooming on their platforms. Around ninety per cent of Australian kids aged eight to seventeen play online games. The Commissioner’s own description is that offenders make contact inside the game and then move the child to private messaging.
Showing sexual material to a child is one of the oldest tools in the kit. It’s called desensitisation, and it does two jobs at once. It normalises the thing that’s coming, and it manufactures a secret. The child now has something they think they’ll be in trouble for. That’s grooming.
So the conversation has two halves and both are important. The first half is explaining that people can show things in a tricky way. On a phone, in a game, in a video that starts out looking like nothing.
That grown-ups and older kids sometimes do this on purpose, and it’s never the fault of the person who got shown.
The second half is the bit I think matters most, because it can make the difference between us finding out about the behaviour or not.
the bit about getting in trouble
Young children can take this literally. If someone bigger than them says they’ll be in trouble, they can believe it completely, because big people are correct, and because at four years old the difference between doing a bad thing and seeing a bad thing hasn’t formed yet. If someone tells your child they’ll be in trouble for looking, your child will carry that as fact, for years, silently. They won’t tell you because they are too afraid they will get in trouble.
So you have to say the other thing out loud, often, in plain words.
You will never be in trouble for telling me. Not ever. Not if you looked. Not if you laughed. Not if you didn’t tell me straight away. Not if you promised someone you wouldn’t.
Its important that you tell me so that we can both work out if you are in a tricky situation. And here is an added bonus, if they promised you more of something you like in exchange for not telling me, tell me and I will organise something special for you.
Don’t tell them that you plan on telling me either, let them think its a secret.
Then say it again next month.
this isn’t on children
I’m not saying a child can be trained into safety or responsible for preventing grooming. This is not a replacement for four eyes on children, or CCTV, or a worker register with actual teeth, or an investigation that interviews the witnesses.
There is gap between the moment grooming starts, something happens and an adult works out what is happening and in that stretch of time what we are doing with these conversations, these small conversations that we are having often is enabling our child to control that gap. We are giving them insight, protective insight and language.
Even more that that we are getting in to our child’s mind about the tricky situations that we want to pretend do not happen and we are influencing them before another person with ill intentions does.
I’ll keep writing about the buildings. The ministerial briefs, the standards, and Ill keep protesting the finding that closed our investigation with no offence detected. That doesn’t stop.
But I’m going to do this one every month with my own kid, in the car, on the way to swimming, in as I integrate it into the latest bed time story.
Have your one this week. It’ll take you four minutes.
Resources and further reading
If you want to keep having these conversations with your child, these are the resources I recommend.
National Office for Child Safety — One Talk at a Time
The Australian Government’s National Office for Child Safety has free resources for parents and carers, including conversation starters, body-safety activities and five free read-alouds from Jayneen Sanders’ Little BIG Chats series: Consent, Private Parts are Private, My Safety Network, Secrets and Surprises and My Early Warning Signs.
Little BIG Chats and body-safety resources
One Talk at a Time and conversations with children
eSafety Commissioner — online grooming and child sexual abuse
eSafety has practical resources for parents about online grooming, unwanted contact, online child sexual abuse and talking to children about what they encounter online.
eSafety: Child grooming and unwanted contact
eSafety: Parent resources
Safe4Kids — protective education for parents
Safe4Kids is a Perth-based child protection education organisation. Its resources cover protective behaviours, body safety, early warning signs, secrets, safety teams and how parents can have these conversations with children. It also offers an online Parents’ Information Course.
Safe4Kids
Safe4Kids Parents’ Information Course
eSafeKids — protective behaviours books and resources
Perth-based eSafeKids has a large range of children’s books and resources covering protective behaviours, body safety, consent, boundaries, trusted adults and online safety.
eSafeKids protective behaviours resources
Australian Centre to Counter Child Exploitation (ACCCE)
If you come across online child sexual exploitation or child sexual abuse material, the ACCCE provides information about how and where to report it. If a child is in immediate danger, call 000.
ACCCE — How to report online child sexual exploitation
If your child tells you something has happened
The National Office for Child Safety also has guidance on responding when a child asks a difficult question or tells you about something that has happened. The advice is simple: listen, stay calm, validate what they have said and keep the conversations going.
National Office for Child Safety — Responding to tricky questions
One share. One parent. One child safer.
Legal and Privacy Concerns. Under Australian privacy laws and for personal safety, the author uses a pseudonym and AI-altered imagery. This work features literary and reflective essays expressing a subjective lived experience; it is not a legal or investigative record. All references to harm or conduct reflect the author’s honest opinion and personal interpretation of events. Regarding the matters referenced, police investigations resulted in a finding of no offence detected; this work is an exploration of the psychological interpretations and healing that follow such experiences. While the author is a psychologist, the views expressed here are personal and do not constitute professional psychological advice or a clinical opinion.
A note on AI. I used AI as an editing tool while working on this piece — mainly to help me spot repetition, tighten some wording and think about structure. The writing, ideas, experiences and final decisions are mine.
What sentence stem works with your kids?
Put it in the comments so other parents can learn from it.