Child sexual abuse prevention education: A review of school policy and curriculum provision in Australia

Abstract

The past four decades have seen increasing public and professional awareness of child sexual abuse. Congruent with public health approaches to prevention, efforts to eliminate child sexual abuse have inspired the emergence of prevention initiatives which can be provided to all children as part of their standard school curriculum. However, relatively little is known about the scope and nature of child sexual abuse prevention efforts in government school systems internationally. This paper assesses and compares the policies and curriculum initiatives in primary (elementary) schools across state and territory Departments of Education in Australia. Using publicly available electronic data, a deductive qualitative content analysis of policy and curriculum documents was undertaken to examine the characteristics of child sexual abuse prevention education in these school systems. It was found that the system-level provision occurs unevenly across state and territory jurisdictions. This results in the potential for substantial inequity in Australian children’s access to learning opportunities in child abuse prevention education as a part of their standard school curriculum. In this research, we have developed a strategy for generating a set of theoretically-sound empirical criteria that may be more extensively applied in comparative research about prevention initiatives internationally.

Keywords:

• child sexual abuse
• prevention
• policy
• curriculum

Acknowledgements

This study was supported by an Australian Research Council Discovery Project grant (DP1093717). Kerryann Walsh was funded by a Queensland University of Technology Vice Chancellor’s Research Fellowship (2010–2012). The authors thank Karen Conlon and Dr Trish Glasby who generated the idea for this paper by preparing a brief curriculum scan for the Queensland Department of Education and Training’s 2009 Protective Behaviours Curriculum Roundtable. We also thank Wendy Smith and Malena McNamara for assistance with manuscript preparation.

Notes

1. The primary school enrolment ratio for Australian children, averaged from 2005 to 2009, was 96% for boys and 97% for girls (UNICEF, 2011).

2. In 1974, the United States Congress enacted this Act, establishing the National Center on Child Abuse and Neglect (NCCAN) (DePanfilis & Salus, 1992). NCCAN developed a series of user manuals, some of which described professional roles and responsibilities in relation to child protection. It has been suggested that this constituted the first official statements of professional roles for professionals involved in the child protection system.

3. The first iteration of the National Safe Schools Framework was endorsed in 2003 and later reviewed. In the first iteration, state and territory education ministers agreed to report annually on their strategies and initiatives to provide safe, supportive learning environments through the National Report of Schooling in Australia (Ministerial Council on Education, Employment, Training and Youth Affairs [MCEETYA], 2005).

4. Legislative and policy-based child maltreatment reporting obligations for teachers in Australia are critically examined in Mathews et al. (2008), and Mathews, Walsh, Butler, and Farrell (2006).

5. This compliance is required under a recommendation of the Gordon Inquiry (2002). The Inquiry recommended the provision of protective behaviours education to students in all schools through existing curriculum frameworks in the WA Department of Education. It advised the Department of Education to seek assistance from other agencies in providing such education (Recommendations 116 and 117).

6. Reception is the term used for the first year of formal school for five-year-olds in South Australia.

7. We use the term lower primary school to refer to grade or year levels K–3.

8. We use the term upper primary school to refer to grade or year levels 4–7.

9. The relevant statement is repeated verbatim in each of the six curriculum documents but with different page references.

10. A peak body is a representative organisation providing information dissemination, professional development, advocacy, policy analysis, and other services for organisational members and the general public.

11. Since 2008, a National Curriculum has been under development in an effort to unify curriculum provision and to set out what all young Australians are to be taught, and the expected quality of learning as they progress through school (Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority, 2012, p. 14). The eight core learning areas within the curriculum are English, mathematics, science, humanities and social sciences, the arts, languages, health and physical education, and technologies.