eSafeKids

🧡 A wonderful opportunity for eSafeKids!

Kayelene has been selected to deliver Protective Behaviours & Body Safety Professional Learning to staff across the WA Department of Education from 2026–2029.

The Department of Education’s initiative aims to ensure educators have the knowledge, skills, confidence, competence, practical strategies and resources they need to deliver protective behaviours education effectively within their school and community context.

I love working alongside the adults who educate and care for children, because child safety starts with adults.

Effective child sexual abuse prevention education is a shared responsibility between families, schools and the wider community. Acknowledging children are shaped by their experiences at school but also at home and in the community eSafeKids will support schools to explore parent engagement and the important role parents/carers play as the primary and continuing educator of their child.

❓Do these statistics shock you?

👉 Reports of online child sexual abuse and exploitation received by the Australian Centre to Counter Child Exploitation have surged by 41% in just 12 months.

❗️2023-2024
58,503 reports, 160 reports per day

❗️2024-2025
82,764 reports, 226 reports per day

😢 Every report contains photos and videos of real children being sexually abused.

These figures highlight a reality we need to confront, law enforcement cannot arrest its way out of this problem, the volume is simply too great.

The scale of the challenge is growing and our response must grow with it. Every child deserves to be safe, and every adult has a responsibility to play their part.

Parental supervision, education, conversation and participation is vital, and can reduce the opportunity for online child sexual abuse and exploitation to occur.

👆Visit the free eSafeKids Keeping Kids Safe Community and read 4 Pillars: Building Strong Foundations for Online Safety & Digital Wellbeing

Harm to children often comes not from those society teaches us to FEAR, but from those it teaches us to TRUST.

This is one of the hardest truths to accept and is also what makes child sexual abuse so insidious. If we focus only on strangers we leave children unprepared for the situations they are statistically much more likely to face.

Teaching children Protective Behaviours and Body Safety doesn’t take away a child’s innocence, it protects it.

There’s lots of resources on the eSafeKids website to support you.

📚 Educating children about body safety and the subtle red flags that may indicate grooming, both online and offline.

Darby will take children and the adults who care for them through the subtle ‘red flags’ that may indicate a child and their family are being groomed. Although a ‘tricky’ topic, being able to identify grooming red flags is crucial for children and adults to stop abuse before it starts.

This book is age-appropriate and empowering and not only covers grooming red flags, both online and offline, but also …

⭐️Body Safety
⭐️Private Parts
⭐️Private Places
⭐️Warning Signs
⭐️Trusted Adults
⭐️Body Boundaries
⭐️Consent
⭐️Secrets
⭐️Private Photos

👆Link in bio

Keeping it real … What this smile doesn’t show is bulging discs at L3-L4, L4-L5 and L5-S1 and Bilateral Sacroiliitis. Thank goodness for a wonderful Pain Specialist, hopefully another round of pain injections and a nerve block this week should have the chronic pain of the last six months back to manageable discomfort for another year.

Tech companies have been operating with relative impunity for more than 20 years and that may finally be starting to change …

Meta has been fined $US567 million in the largest child safety ruling against a social media company to date. This is in addition to a $US375 million fine imposed earlier this year. Meta is appealing the decision but the tide may finally be turning!

This is an issue I’ve written extensively about in my submission to the Joint Select Committee on Social Media and Australian Society report, Social Media: The Good, The Bad and The Ugly (2024).

For years technology companies have engaged in wilful blindness, prioritising commercial gain ahead of children’s health, wellbeing and safety.

Perpetrators of sexual abuse disregard children’s bodily autonomy and body boundaries, teaching children about these concepts can help them recognise grooming behaviours.

Teach children;

👉 People should respect your personal space, and you have a responsibility to respect other people’s personal space.

👉 Sometimes a yes can change into a no. If you agree to someone coming into our personal space, you can change our mind at any time.

👉 If you say no and someone gets angry or upset, it does not mean you should have said yes.

👉 You don’t have to give up your comfort to lessen someone else’s discomfort.

👉 Safe adults respect your personal space and your body boundaries.

📚 There’s lots of bodily autonomy, body boundaries, personal space, consent and respect books on the eSafeKids website.

Link: www.esafekids.com.au/shop

💔 As an ex Child Abuse Detective one of the greatest challenges was the injustice of the legal system.

👎 A man charged with possessing child sexual abuse and exploitation material minimised his offending by saying it was “just po*******hy, just a sexual act ...”

👉 Let’s be absolutely clear, the r**e, torture and sexual abuse of children, often in the most horrendous circumstances is not “just po*******hy”.

👉 The court heard the offender had no prior convictions and took into account his highly specialised and unique expertise as a Telstra employee when sparing him from a custodial sentence.

👉 I wish the children had been spared the abuse inflicted upon them by those who create the demand for child sexual abuse and exploitation material.

😢 These are real children, real crimes and very real lifelong trauma.

👉 I wish the children had been spared from the offenders who abused them.

👉 Spared from those who created the demand for that abuse.

👉 Spared from a system that seems to place greater weight on an offender’s future than on a child’s stolen childhood.

Until we stop minimising these offences and recognise the harm behind every photo and video, we will continue to fail the children whose abuse is being viewed, shared and consumed.

Child sexual abuse is an epidemic in Australia.

If these numbers were attached to any other issue affecting children, there would be a national emergency response. Yet when it comes to child sexual abuse, the response is too often silence.

If we treated child sexual abuse like the public health crisis it is, prevention would be a national priority. Until we treat child sexual abuse with the urgency it demands, we will continue asking why it keeps happening instead of asking why we continue accepting such an inadequate response.

When 1 in 4 Australian children are affected, silence is no longer an option. There’s lots of resources on the eSafeKids website to support education and conversation.