We are tempted to see child sexual abuse as being rare and an organisational aberration. In reality CSA is common and ubiquitous. It happens everywhere and anywhere that safeguarding is weak. As such, sensible vigilance is needed or we risk ‘green lighting’ the paedophiles in our community.

With somewhere between 1-4% of men and also some women with these proclivities, institutional leaders must be ever alert to the risks of child sex offenders. This applies particularly to those entities like schools focussed on child-related services. The policies and processes to mitigate these risks must be overt and robustly implemented. Safeguarding practices that are not obvious or downplayed will ‘green light’ the attention of paedophiles and other child sex offenders.

Organisations should aspire to making it practically impossible for a paedophile to operate without early detection and removal. Safeguarding needs to have a high visibility!

One Catholic Tasmanian college has seen at least seven child sex offenders since 2005, and yet persists in its position that its safeguarding practices are appropriate and compliant. When erecting a LOUDfence at a local Catholic primary school I was berated by the ‘lollipop traffic warden’ insisting that child sexual abuse could never happen at her wonderful much-loved school, refusing to acknowledge that one teacher was in the courts being prosecuted for collecting child exploitation images.

Key takeaways

1. Where we fail to acknowledge the risks of CSA our response will most certainly ‘green light’ the attention of paedophiles.
2. Half-measures are dangerous in that they provide a false sense of reassurance.
3. Organisation leaders who downplay the risks of child sexual abuse are inadvertently inviting the attention of paedophiles. Take your children elsewhere, be it a school, church, sports club, child care centre, etc.
4. Safeguarding must be ‘high-vis’!