New program helps students, teachers and families build resilience to abuse

The MacKillop Institute is calling for parents and schools to engage in critical conversations about sexual safety through a new national program designed to combat online and peer abuse.

Power to Kids in Schools targets child sexual exploitation with a focus on comprehensive school-based intervention. The professional learning program, piloted in Melbourne Archdiocese Catholic schools (MACS), grew out of earlier work with children in residential and foster care.

Children in residential care account for 33 per cent of child sexual exploitation reports on children in care in Australia, according to data from the 2017 Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse.

MacKillop Family Services CEO Dr Robyn Miller AM says schools were asking for help to deal with the ways evolving technologies were enabling abuse.

‘These things,’ says Dr Miller, holding up a smart phone, ‘have made it even easier for predators and offenders to access kids, to target and groom.’

The threat extends beyond online strangers. Increasingly, children face risks from their peers, with some potentially influenced by online pornography or having experienced abuse themselves.

MacKillop and University of Melbourne analysis of Victorian public schools data reveal an average of six alleged child-on-child sexual abuse incidents are reported to police each week, more than half involving children under 10 years old.

They developed their program Power to Kids in Schools to train teachers and schools in strengthening prevention and responses to child sexual exploitation, harmful sexual behaviours and dating violence.

The program has been designed to engage with families from the get go.

It integrates ways of talking to young people that gives those who may need to disclose abuse the confidence the adult will believe them, says Dr Miller.

‘Kids actually want good relationships with adults,’ she says, adding that instilling trust opens the way for such relationships to develop.

While the program aligns with existing consent and respectful relationships education, what makes it different is that it brings parents into the conversation.

‘The program has been designed to engage with families from the get go,’ Dr Miller says.

Smeeta Singh, National Program Director of Power to Kids in Schools, emphasises the need to support educators in addressing child sexual abuse, which she says is increasingly by other children.

‘Schools are sitting out there in the mess and complexity of it all … managing children who are causing harm, children who are experiencing harm.’

‘Children are searching right now for information, and the spaces that answer them are pornography, social media, AI, chatbots that are emulating friendships and relationships,’ Ms Singh says.

The program has trained educators to identify abuse indicators, develop intervention tools and create supportive strategies for students. The MacKillop Institute says the feedback from around 400 educators from the Catholic school system has been largely positive.

MACS head of student services Bernadette Cronin says MACS became involved because they were looking for a system-wide response to schools’ concerns about children’s behaviour.

She praises the program’s flexibility, allowing schools to tailor responses to their unique challenges while providing system-level resources and support.

Ms Cronin says the partnership model is a major attraction, as it fits with MACS’ philosophy of working with parents, acknowledging that they are the primary educators of their children.

Bernadette says that thanks to the program, MACS is now better able to support teachers to in turn support students and families.

We’re very lucky to have this program. It’s empowering.

Teachers Rachel and Billy from the boys’ secondary school St Bede’s College in Mentone and East Bentleigh were part of a focus group on the formation of Power to Kids in Schools, and were so impressed they arranged for their school to be part of the pilot program.

‘The big challenge for us was how to empower 365 staff to work with 1,400 students,’ Rachel says.

Billy says some teachers are more open to the idea of having ‘difficult’ conversations with students than others, but that it is important to get all staff on board for the whole-of-school approach of the program to work.

Rachel and Billy say they are seeing change in the interaction between teachers, students and parents, and feel that they are on the right path.

There are unique challenges in working with adolescent boys that the teachers have had to grapple with. Billy says there are many in the cohorts he’s worked with in 12 years as a teacher who are emotionally intelligent and able to express their feelings.

‘And as we know, [there’s also] that stereotypical adolescent young man who holds on to a lot of those feelings. But that just makes this program more beneficial because those little signs may not be as overt [compared with girls],’ he says.

‘We are able to pick up on those early warning signs … avoidance or misbehaving, something that’s just out of character that would have been dismissed before.’

It’s the faith, hope and love that underpins everything we do.

There is still work to be done, the teachers say. The inescapable issue of children’s access to pornography and the impact it has on their psyche is still something of a taboo topic that the teachers agree will need to be dealt with. They say the MacKillop Institute training is helping them build towards having conversations with staff, students and parents, and being able to take sensitive but decisive action.

‘We’re very lucky to have this program. It’s empowering the staff. What I’m loving about it is that it’s embedded within the student body now, [part of] that whole-school approach,’ says Billy.

While the program is designed for all schools, not just the Catholic sector, Rachel says Power to Kids in Schools fits seamlessly into the Catholic ethos. ’It’s the faith, hope and love that underpins everything we do.’