Keeping Ourselves Safe - New Zealand's approach to child abuse prevention education in schools

Author

Owen Sanders, Manager, Youth Education Service

Expected Speaker

Owen Sanders, Manager, Youth Education Service

Organisation

New Zealand Police

For more than a decade now the Youth Education Service of the New Zealand Police has been assisting primary and secondary schools to implement the child abuse prevention programme Keeping Ourselves Safe. Four classroom, teaching programmes have been written to cover all years of the school system. All have been revised regularly to incorporate evaluation knowledge.

Research has been undertaken to discover whether Keeping Ourselves Safe is effective in protecting youngsters from abuse. The success of the rather unusual delivery method that involves teachers and sworn Police Education Officers has been considered. Research has been conducted with different age levels from five-year-olds to teenagers, using student, teacher and parent questionnaires and interviews. Pre and post testing has investigated changes after using the programme and investigated on-going gains and deficits over time. A number of focus groups between evaluators and school students have been held to clarify the unique perspectives of young people.

Results suggest that the programme is effective in meeting its three objectives. Youngsters already involved in abuse are seeking help. The programme teaches understandings and skills that enable youngsters to avoid abuse. Keeping Ourselves Safe contributes positively to the raising the school community's awareness of the need to protect its' youngsters.

Despite these apparently successful outcomes, maximising the value of Keeping Ourselves Safe is still sometimes difficult to achieve. Efforts to replace misleading stereotyped images and concepts associated with 'stranger danger' have had only limited success. While the research affirms that the school can be an effective context to work in, schools need a lot of support to be successful. The whole issue of abuse, especially sexual abuse can be very traumatic for a school. Schools consider the support from Police Education Officers to be essential to the success of the Keeping Ourselves Safe programme and this is affirmed by independent evaluation. Police Education Officers are not always available when schools want them.

The development of Keeping Ourselves Safe continues with the writing of a draft programme for early childhood centres.

Presentation

Paper

Biography

After a career in education Owen began working for the New Zealand Police in 1981and is currently Manager of the Youth Education Service. He has been primarily responsible for a number of education programmes for schools including the child abuse prevention programme, Keeping Ourselves Safe. Owen was awarded a QSM in 1995, in the same year he was granted a Winston Churchill Fellowship to the United States to study drug and violence prevention programmes. In 1997 he was invited to the Illinois State University to make presentations about Keeping Ourselves Safe. He Attended DARE International Summits at Washington 1996 and Sao Paulo 1999 and has made presentations at the American Psychological Association Conventions in 1997, 2000 and 2004.