Building safe organisations with and for children and young people: recommendations from a participatory research project on safety in institutions

Objectives Australia is currently engaged in a Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse which aims to understand not only what has occurred in the past but also how child abuse can be prevented and... [ view full abstract ]

Objectives
Australia is currently engaged in a Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse which aims to understand not only what has occurred in the past but also how child abuse can be prevented and responded to within contemporary organisations. In considering how they might best be kept safe, the Royal Commission recognised that there was a need to understand how children and young people understand and experience safety and their perceptions of how adults and institutions were responding to their safety needs. This paper presents the findings from a participatory study with Australian children and identifies the key elements of child-responsive approaches to preventing and responding to their safety concerns (which includes but is not limited to child sexual abuse).
Method
The research reported in this paper was mixed method, engaging 121 children and young people (aged 4-18) in focus groups and 1400 children and young people in an on-line survey. The focus groups attempted to capture children and young people’s conceptualisations of safety and to determine elements of a child-centred (and child-informed) approach to identifying and responding to issues in an institutional context. Survey were then built, in collaboration with children and young people, and gauge the extent to which children believed that instiutions were demonstrating child-safe characteristics and responses, particularly when children and young people encountered an unsafe adult or peer.
Results
The study found that children and young people conceptualised safety in terms of their physical and behavioural responses to people, places and experiences; that they differentiated being safe from feeling safe; that they stressed the importance of familiarity and predictability and having trusted adults around them who valued their fears, engaged them in finding solutions and empowered them to identify and manage safety concerns interdependently. The online survey highlighted children and young people needed adults to demonstrate that they pay attention when children raise their concerns and knowing children well enough to determine when they were unsafe (as demonstrated by their behaviour) as being most important. Children and young people’s confidence in adults and institutions to identify and respond to children’s safety concerns (including possible child sexual abuse) ranged depending on age, gender and institutional context.

Conclusions
Children and young people conceptualise safety in ways that are often different to adults. Their perceptions of how adults regard children, children’s fears and concerns and their capacity to deal with safety issues affect their confidence and help-seeking behaviours. Children and young people were generally unhappy with some of the ways that adults and institutions respond to children, believed that they required more information and education about sexual abuse and strategies for keeping themselves safe and that partnerships with children and young people would yield better outcomes.