Keeping Children Safe From Sexual Abuse in Institutions

When a 2 y.o described to her mum that a childcare worker kissed her bottom while changing her nappy her mum acted quickly to report the incident.

Unfortunately, in our justice system a two year old isn’t a credible witness and the process to get any testimony is, by its very nature, intimidating to a child. Even more so to a small child who is only just learning to be verbal.

Our justice system was hard won. To be innocent until proven guilty is something we all take for granted and we know the profound consequences of wrongly accusing someone of something that will damage their reputation.

The question we are left with is how do we take seriously a child’s accusation while protecting the accused’s rights?

Currently insufficient evidence means no police action is taken, and the absence of a work place safety initiative means the accused either moves on or is moved on to other employment.

When the concerns don’t follow the accused to the new workplace we know from an avalanche of case studies that they offend again unhindered by scrutiny.

When something stops us from acting in a situation that clearly needs action, there are likely some invisible cultural rules that are stopping us. This strange cultural paralysis is hard to speak about and even harder to move beyond.

Artists and film makers are often best at disclosing these ambiguities.

A memorable scene from The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, a 1972 Luis Bunuel film, has a group of dinner guests sitting on toilets around a dining table. When someone wants to eat they politely whisper a question about where the little room is that someone goes to eat. By flipping the social norms we see in the absurdity and the invisible cultural rules appear.

A recent study undertaken between community groups and the University of NSW anonymously surveyed a cross section of Australians to discover Child sexual offending behaviours amongst Australian men.

They found that a staggering 19.6% of Australian men have sexual feelings for children and/or have sexually offended against children.

That statistic alone should warrant a workplace safety approach to all workplaces that involve the care of children by men.

We certainly spent more time and resources on managing things like asbestos despite mesothelioma having a much lower incidence in our community.

There are no thought police. You cannot go to jail for having sexual feelings towards children but children know. Ask any group of teenage girls what men they find creepy and they will tell you.

If he can’t pass a teenage girl sniff test, how does he get a job caring for babies and being part of their formative sense of self?

It needs to be said that the 80% of men who neither have sexual feelings for children nor offend include men who are a hugely important resource in raising happy, healthy, well balanced children. We should also not ignore the tiny percentage of women who abuse children.

Workplace safety in Australia is well placed to manage risk assessment and harm minimisation but until this study there was very little data about offenders. Most studies looked at child victim demographics.

It might seem a stretch to say that men as a cohort pose an unacceptable risk but as soon as we accept that fact we can look at ways to mitigate that risk.

We can acknowledge that for a child to accuse someone of abuse there must have been something seriously lacking in that adult’s ability to take care of that child, and therefore children generally.

Whether or not an accusation leads to arrest should not interfere with a workplace safety approach. A complaint should hold weight regardless of its veracity because, at the very least, it points to a failure to take care at some level.

Boundary protection could simply be an expansion of workplace rules that already limit things like bosses having relationships with subordinates, sexual harassment in the workplace, professional boundaries, work/life boundaries and client/employer boundaries.

Training programs emphasising consequences for real or perceived boundary violations with the emphasis on vigilance and protecting the vulnerable could become part of the certification process for all jobs involving care of children.

At some level we all know that we have a long way to go to keep children safe, but until we start being able to speak about the issues we are doomed to fail.