Week 9: Protective Behaviours Flashcards
What do child safe environments do?
- Create an environment with children’s safety/wellbeing at the centre
- Emphasise genuine engagement and value of young people
- Reduce likelihood of harm
- Increase identification of harm
What is child protection?
- Understand the role/responsibilities of child safety
identify/recognise indicators of abuse - Understand types/theories of abuse
- Manage concerns in individual setting
- Manage disclosure
What is protective education?
- A series of lesson plans on PB West site designed for children on adults to teach
- Important for all students
What are protective behaviours?
- Is a process that embeds a culture of feeling and being safe
- Teaches the themes, concepts and strategies of PB’s including Protective Education to children, young and vulnerable people to help them feel safe
- Creates empathy and connection
- Empowers the people involved
- Develops self-regulation and resilience by providing a framework for responsibility for self and responsibility to others
Define child abuse?
Harm in relation to a child, means any detrimental effect of a significant nature on the child’s wellbeing
The child has suffered, or is likely to suffer harm as a result of any one or more of the following:
- Physical abuse
- Sexual abuse
- Emotional abuse
- Psychological abuse
- Neglect
- Family Domestic Violence
How are victims commonly selected?
Identifying a child who will be both easy to access and unlikely to report their behaviour
What they look for:
- Lack of knowledge about sex and sexuality
- Low levels of assertiveness
- Poor supervision
- Seeking adult approval or attention
- Vulnerabilities that extend beyond the child
Why are children with Special Needs more at risk?
- Are exposed to more adults who need to have contact with them
- Often require more intimate care
- Can have barriers to communication or lack of confidence
- Disclosures made are often ignored/dismissed or not prioritised
- Are not taught sex education/their rights
- Limited parental or other affection
- Ableist attitudes regarding harm and comprehension of abuse
- Behaviour from distress attributed to disability
What is the Protective Behaviours Process?
What are Ableist Attitudes?
- Children with disabilities are less likely to receive sex education
- Children with disability are less liekly to be believed when sexual abuse is reported
- It is assumed that children with disability cannot comprehend the world around them
- It may be assumed that children with disability do not understand what haws happened and therefore are not affected by sexual abuse
- Communication of the distress caused by sexual absue through behaviour is misattributed to a child’s disability
What are some of the benefits of Protective Behaviours in the classroom?
- Encourage independence
- Build resilience
- Develop self respect
- Develops respect for others
- Make them better learners
- Empowered children do not make ideal victims
- Foundations for creating a consent culture
- Grow confidence and self-esteem
What are some of the concerns with Protective Behaviours in the classroom?
- It can be incongruent
teacher/instructor competence regarding PB processes in all applications - Trauma triggers
- Personal safety viewed as lesson plan rather than a life skills process
- Expectation of children being able to stop abuse from occurring and the effects of these expectations
- Insufficient accessible support for children and educators
Responding to a child who discloses; What to do
- Believe the child
- Reassure them
- Be calm
- In a quiet place, talk
- Truthful about what you can/cant do
- Let them take their time, use their own words and tell them what you will do next
Responding to a child who discloses; What NOT to do
- Confront the person alleged
- Ask questions which may distress the child
- Ask the child to repeat the story
- Assess or investigate
