Updates
Blog: Contextual prevention of child abuse – “it takes a village”
This is the third instalment in our series on contextual prevention. You can find an introduction to contextual prevention and its core components here. The second instalment on safety for school students is here.
So far in this series we have discussed contextual prevention basics, and considered how it was applied in a school. Now let’s look at how it has been used to promote safety at the neighbourhood or whole-of-community level.
A community-led approach
Contextual prevention can also be scaled up and applied on a neighbourhood or whole-of-community level. This largely involves the same steps that are taken when applying contextual prevention to a defined setting (such as a school), just on a bigger scale. Key questions include ‘where and when is this happening’, ‘what environmental factors might facilitate or protect against this behaviour’ and ‘how might natural surveillance and guardianship be enhanced’. This would typically lead to multiple prevention initiatives being implemented. The goal remains, though, to create safer environments for children.
The Sexual Violence and Prevention Unit (SVPRU) team shared a whole-of-community case study, to illustrate this approach. The case study involved a small Australian town, where community members had identified concerns about harmful sexual behaviours (HSB) and peer-to-peer abuse among children and teenagers in public spaces (e.g., local parks). To address these concerns, community leaders invited a team of practitioners and researchers to work with them to prevent further abuse.
From a contextual prevention perspective, it is critical that child safety efforts in neighbourhoods and communities are done in genuine partnership with the community concerned. The team discussed the need for partnership and taking the time to build trust in their research report on the project: “Community engagement and adequate time for community consultation were prioritised to ensure issues were understood from a community and cultural perspective. Project team members worked alongside the local community to develop prevention activities from the ground up, and built relationships and trust with community members… Community input and involvement came to define the project: working “with” the community to enhance safety, rather than providing a service “to” the community… Only after this community engagement was established did the project turn its focus to engaging other local services and statutory authorities. This included the development of collaborative partnerships with police, education, health, child protection, and justice authorities.”
Contextual assessment and prevention on the neighbourhood level
The team observed behaviour in the spaces the community had identified were problematic, carried out environmental audits, and interviewed community members. In addition to physical barriers to active guardianship in both public and school environments, they identified contextual factors of concern, including norms among the children and young people that supported HSBs and peer abuse.
The team and community members formed a partnership aimed at reducing opportunities for HSBs and abuse; increasing the likelihood of detection and intervention where HSBs and abuse occurred; and addressing social determinants of abuse, such as violence-supporting norms.
The work involved the whole town, and included:
- Enhancing active guardianship through training for adults, from teachers and service providers to parents and police
- Provision of age-appropriate bystander training to children and young people
- Developing a shared language, and ways of communicating, to support identification of risks and prevention of harm
- Auditing of public environments and adjustments made to increase safety (See the second instalment in this series for examples of the changes schools can make.)
- Targeted police patrols, as an extended guardianship function, both in preventing abuse and helping children and young people reach safety when at risk
- Rolling out therapeutic programs with children and young people with particular concerns.
QCOSS is grateful to the University of the Sunshine Coast SVRPU’ Associate Professor Nadine McKillop and Dr Susan Rayment-McHugh for all their work and for their generosity in sharing groundbreaking research and implementation strategies with the Quality Collaboration Network (QCN). The QCN is a peer support network for community sector professionals with responsibilities for quality, governance and compliance. You can join the QCN and sign up for On Board, our governance newsletter, here.