The theme of today’s session on child protection was secrets, who to talk to, and what secrets should never be kept.

Ms Jill began by reading the book: Some Secrets Should Never be Kept, a story written to help keep kids safe from sexual abuse.

What secrets should never be kept?

• Secrets that make you feel uncomfortable or bad.
• Secrets like someone saying “never tell your parents about this…”

How do a lot of children feel when they are abused?

• ashamed, guilty, frightened, worried, nervous etc.
• many children are threatened with consequences by an abuser if they tell anyone.
• as a consequence they feel worried about how them telling what happened will impact others.

Ms Jill discussed how it is against the law for an adult to touch a child’s private parts, have the child touch their private parts, or take inappropriate or naked photos of children. Several children shared stories of when people had taken photos of them that made them uncomfortable (though none of these were clearly abusive).

The conversation then went to the subject of “What happens to an adult who is doing something abusive to children?” Ms Jill told a story about working at a previous school where a 4th grade girl came to her after a session and shared that she was being sexually abused at home. Ms Jill shared that after being told this, she was legally required to contact the police, who then had to hear the story directly from the girl, prior to arresting the adult who was abusing her. The girl stayed with other family members for some time, the girl was protected and the adult who was abusing her was removed from the situation.

Eventually the discussion went towards how despite all of these very scary things that do happen, these things happen very very rarely and these discussions are not designed to make people fearful. These discussions are just designed to help us know what to do, how to be safe, in these really difficult, very frightening, but thankfully very rare, situations.

In discussing photos of naked children, Ms Jill made the distinction between photos of children that are innocent, like baby pictures in the bath, and those that are harmful, that are of older children, or just feel like they’re not a good thing. Students were instructed that if they come across pictures that are inappropriate of naked children, while online or anywhere, they need to tell an adult they trust, so that the children can be protected.

Finally, we discussed who you could tell if you came across something wrong, or something wrong happened to you. We discussed the concept of three circles of trust. People who to turn to first, the closest people who you would tell if you could, others you could turn to if the first people weren’t options or didn’t believe you, and a third circle of who you could turn to if the first two groups weren’t options.

This session concludes this series of lessons.