In 1994 the federal government amended the Crimes Act so Australia could prosecute ‘sex
tourists’ when they came home from pleasure trips to developing nations where they had happily rented or raped the children of the poor. This law has not been much used: just 16 formal investigations and 12 convictions. A government spokesman reported in The Age on 15 September said this was OK because the law was meant to encourage prosecutions in the country where the offences occurred. That, of course, is bulldust.
We prosecute Australian paedophiles because we have more skills and resources. Australian police have supposedly better specialist skills at interviewing child victims. Poor people in Thailand or Cambodia or East Timor tend not to trust people in uniform, or what children say. Australian courts, prosecutors and lawyers are allegedly better at ‘hearing’ child witnesses.
Yet after 20 years of special laws, witness and courtroom processes and education and media revelations about serial, systemic sex abuse by adults with authority over children, the rate of successful prosecutions is actually dropping.
The best way to protect children from sexual exploitation is to prevent it. Since you can’t pick a paedophile—their success depends on being ‘nice’ to children (and their folks)—then raising and encouraging children not to be victims is the only other choice. If children can solve problems, if they have access to people they trust, and if they have the confidence to tell secrets because they have experienced being taken seriously, they can use that little bit of power they have: to say no, and tell someone.
Nineteen years ago I learned about a simple new program designed to give children these skills. The Protective Behaviours program is based on a couple of solid principles: letting children know they have a right to feel safe, and that nothing is so awful that they can’t tell someone about it. It teaches basic skills: how to recognise the physical signs of fear and danger, and how to act on them, through their personal networks of safe adults to go to.
Professor Freda Briggs has been saying for a very long time that this is not enough and reiterated this view at the National Protective Behaviours conference in WA in October 2003. The evidence tells us some unpalatable truths, said this former London police officer/social worker/teacher who is now the underappreciated grande dame of child protection based in South Australia. According to her work