Our newest CALI Award winner is Dr. Freda Briggs, child protection expert.
With over 50 years of experience within the field, Freda is considered to be one of Australia’s preeminent voices in child protection and has become a respected advisor and consultant of child protection issues around the world.
Q: How did you become involved in child protection?
Freda: By accident! Many years ago when I was employed by London’s Metropolitan Police at New Scotland Yard I was offered the opportunity to undertake a three month course in child protection, offered by child psychologists and children’s social workers as well as police.
Thereafter I worked with child protection cases. I soon realised that some children didn’t stand a chance in life and I became an adopted ‘aunty’ to some of those taken into care, taking them on excursions and sending birthday gifts.
Six years later I moved on to social work and became a foster carer but because social workers worked hours to suit clients (and by this time I had a husband and two children) I turned to teaching.
I left school at 14 and studied for Year 12 by correspondence at the age of 33, went to university and trained as an early childhood teacher. With this unusual background I was placed in the toughest schools in town and realised that I could spot abused children not only in my own class but elsewhere in the school.
I also realised how important teachers are in identifying, reporting abuse and supporting victims and their non-offending parents… roles for which they received no training. Their mishandling of victims’ disclosures of sexual abuse often increased the psychological harm inflicted by their abusers.
I continued studying at university at evening classes and eventually became a lecturer in child development training social workers and pre-school teachers. I introduced the first lectures on child abuse in 1970 although there were no textbooks available at that time.
As I had a Masters Degree in Early Childhood Education when there wasn’t even a Bachelor’s Degree available in Australia, I was invited to become Director of Early Childhood Studies and set up new courses at the State College of Victoria to attract mature age students and cater for the migrant areas of North and West Melbourne.
In 1980, I became Dean of the Institute of Early Childhood and Family Studies, later attached to the University of South Australia and there I introduced what I later learned was the first multi-professional child protection course in the world. This came to light when I was invited to assist universities in the USA, Germany and Brazil to create similar courses.
My colleagues thought I was mad. Child abuse might happen in the US (the Americans were making movies about it) but it didn’t happen in Australia… least of all in Adelaide! And, of course, there were those who thought that child abuse was “welfare” and nothing to do with teachers… “Teachers are only there to teach”, they said.
Furthermore, the academic committee could not comprehend how it could be an academic subject. By that time I was able to show that a substantial amount of research was being undertaken in North America and there was scope for research here.
When child sexual abuse came to the forefront in the early 1980’s, I had collected all the child protection programs for children used in the US and Canada. I was invited to share my knowledge with Victoria Police who were under pressure to replace Stranger Danger with something more realistic given that 94% of reported abuse involved people known and trusted by their victims.
VicPol set up a committee to choose one of the American programmes and they chose Wisconsin. I was concerned that the program they selected had never been tested with children to check their understanding of the concepts but VicPol marketed it Australia-wide. NSW and New Zealand Police rejected it on the grounds that it was too American, too jargoniatic, too simplistic and yet too complex.
They wrote a school program that was developmentally appropriate for all age groups and in 1989-90, I was invited to research the programs with children to find out what they understood. That was the beginning of a 21 year relationship with New Zealand Police and Education Department as a consultant and researcher with literally hundreds of children of all ages.
with children in NZ schools for NZ police. 1990
From there on, I conducted research with child sexual abuse victims, their non-offending parents, male victims and male sex offenders in jails to learn how and why they made the transition from being victims to becoming victimisers.
I learned about the grooming methods they used and how children responded then went on to write twenty books for parents, professionals and books to use with children, including those with intellectual disabilities.
In 2011 ‘Smart Parenting for Safer Kids” was released followed by “Child protection – The essential guide for teachers and professionals whose work involves children (JoJo 2012). Most of my work was self-funded as few organisations have budgets for child protection and children.
Q: The subject of your work is particularly difficult, do you have hope for change?
Freda: The work I do is becoming increasingly difficult because child sexual predators are very manipulative and gain access to work and volunteering that provides access to children and, of course, in addition there are predators within families. The situation is getting worse because of the Internet; predators can access likeminded others and reinforce their deviance.
It is easy for them to join international paedophile clubs that require several thousand new child pornography images for membership. It is easy for predators to contact new child victims in their own homes using Facebook and email.
Furthermore, just as people think that road accidents won’t happen to them, parents think that their children are immune from sexual abuse and do little or nothing to protect them.
Another big problem is that child protection systems across the board (the departments, criminal and family courts) are failing to protect young and disabled children. Child abuse is still a taboo in university courses and the professionals working in this field are inadequately trained, and that includes judges.
Can I see much hope for society? Not without a massive change in attitudes, reforms to legal and child protection systems and community and professional education.
Bearing in mind that 70% of mental illness relates to child sexual abuse and the cost to Australian taxpayers is currently up to $30 billion a year (Monash Univ.). Also bear in mind that a quarter of male victims becomes a victimiser and most start in childhood or adolescence. Unless our politicians take this more seriously as a health issue, the damage to children will only get worse.
Q: Is there a particular story that stands out that you could share with us?
Freda: One significant experience was when a grandma sought my help because she didn’t know what to do. Her 7 year old grand daughter was on holiday from the US and her neighbour invited her to join a picnic with his own two sons and others in the neighbourhood.
As she put the child in the minibus, grandma thanked Mr Clark for being kind and said, “Be a good girl and do what Mr Clark tells you to do”.
Fortunately she didn’t. When she returned she told her grandmother that Mr. Clark had involved them in sexual abuse and she was told to keep it secret. I interviewed the other children who confirmed the allegations and gave the names of others who had been on Mr Clark’s picnics.
In the end, Clark was convicted of offences against 36 local children and was jailed. I was curious why 36 children kept the secret while one little American girl blew the whistle on day one.
She said that her teacher told her class that “no-one is allowed to touch, tickle or play around with the private parts of your body or ask you to touch theirs. If someone tries, you hold out your arms to create a space and say “Stop that it’s not allowed” then tell someone you can trust”.
That simple message stopped a serial paedophile.
Senior Australian of the Year in 2000.
Q: What motivates you?
Freda: Anger.
I get angry that children are treated so badly, not just by child abusers but by the very systems that are there supposedly to protect them. I get angry that politicians are not interested in child protection, presumably because children don’t vote. And yet they control the funding for support services.
When did you ever see a poster or an advertisement advising child abusers where they could get help? I get angry because despite one in three girls and probably as many boys have their lives damaged by child sexual abuse, there is community complacency: no-one wants to know.
Last week I was asked to give a free workshop for parents of children attending three combined NSW schools on how to provide better protection. Parents of 1000 children were invited. The parents of 20 children attended.
When surveyed the next day, the non-attenders said they didn’t come because child protection is “too confronting”.
Q: If you had your way, everyone would spend 5 minutes a day…
Freda: If I had my way everyone would spend 5 minutes a day writing to their federal and state MPs demanding reform to the criminal justice, family court and child protection systems that fail to protect young and disabled children from sexual predators.
Freda has worked with a variety of organisations including the Fijian Government, the World Health Organisation, New Zealand Police, the Department of Education in Australia and UNICEF.
Freda has also presented at a number of Parliamentary Inquiries into child protection issues, advised the State and Federal Government on children’s rights and foster care issues, and was co-inquirer into the investigation of former Governor General Peter Hollingworth’s handling of child sexual abuse allegations when he was Archbishop of Brisbane.
She has published 20 books on children’s rights and child protection issues and still regularly contributes to international journals.
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Congratulations to this wonderful wonderful educator and woman! Freda has always been an inspiration to me as a young editor, editing her book for primary school teachers entitled’ Keeping Children Safe’. This book had such an influence on me I decided I certainly would teach my children body safety from a very young age. Now I am an author of a children’s book on this subject and a advocate for sexual abuse prevention education. A lot of what I do, I owe to Freda Briggs and her inspiring work!
Congratulations to the most deserving fighter, Dr Freda Briggs, for children’s right to grow in safety and love. Unfortunately Freda is a lone she-wolf fighting against the institutionalised system of child abuse. The old concept of “stranger danger” and its new cousin that the child (sexual) abuse is perpetrated by someone known to the child, has been replaced by the systematic, government sponsored system of ‘child protection’. I know, some of you raised your eyebrows to what I just said. I don’t blame you; I would do the same if someone told me this 4-5 years ago.
Here in NSW we have the child protection system (Family and Community Services, the old DOCS, the Children’s Courts and the section of legal profession) who remove children from the parents on suspicion of the children being exposed to risk of (physical, sexual or psychological harm or neglect), placing those children in foster care. So, what’s wrong with that? you may ask.
The wrong part of the system is not the removal of a child when there is reasonable ground to suspect a risk of harm to the child. However, the existence of a parasitic, corrupt system that is appended to the genuine child protection system is what is wrong. My experience in the children’s courts and with parents whose children have been placed into foster care shows that at least half of those children currently in out of home care (about 18,000 in NSW) do not belong there. Once a child is removed from the parents’ care it is a hell of a job to get that child back. No matter what the unfortunate parents do the Community Service workers are not satisfied that the child can be resto5red to parents’ care. If it were not for a few competent and honest Children’s Magistrates and for the lack of foster carers, we would have perhaps 50,000 in NSW alone in the out of home care.
One may ask why is that. The reason is simple: the ‘care and protection’ system in NSW is driven by the private interests, so called ‘charities’ who look after the foster care system – and keep collecting hundreds of millions of dollars a year from the government. In fact, the government is giving them that money voluntarily; don’t ask me why. Just bear in mind that for each child in foster care, in addition to the support paid to the foster carers who look after children 24/7 (some $210 p.w.) the ‘charities’ get about $600 p.w. for each child, at lest at the initial stages of the child’s time in foster care. It has been reported in press that such one charity received between $75 million and $140 million in one year for looking after 1,100 children.
But there is some ‘good news’: the NSW government is going to privatise the child protection system (which is already driven by private interests) in order to make it more cost effective. They plan to significantly reduce the number of children in out of home care – by selling them into adoption! I am not sure if the sale will take place through bidding on eBay or it will be by private arrangements but I know that the adoption laws will be relaxed for an easer approval of adoptions and the task of approval will be given to the most incompetent (and something else) court on the planet Earth, the Children’s Court of NSW (I do apologise to those few competent and honest Children’s Magistrates). Guess where many of those adopted children will end up: in USA. The reason is that, since the Russians placed a ban on the adoption of Russian children into USA (I congratulate the Russian Duma for that), the USA child exchange market turnover has fallen dramatically. The child trafficking industry in USA is in deep depression; let’s help them.
So, dear Freda, you are pitched against the government sponsored child abuse and child exploitation system backed by billions of dollars, while you are forced to fund from your own pocket child protection research, its publication and dissemination.
I was riveted reading your story Freda. The statistics are terrifying and your lifelong fight is inspirational. I only wish that you could see that as a community we have come forward leaps and bounds for your efforts, but sadly this is not so. And yet still you fight. Thank you for your commitment to every child on this planet, I am sure it can be a heavy, heavy job sometimes and you deserve a mountain of recognition for your work.
Powerful stuff. Few things make my blood boil like child abuse and I have not had the time to help fight against it yet. It is really encouraging to know there are people like you out there flying the flag. Really motivates me to do all I can to help others reading this. Thank you for sharing your story.
Our children need a million Freda’s to shout “fix it, NOW !”
There is no known ‘cure’ for pedophiles. I have advocated for a change, a law reform that takes a convicted pedophile out of society for ever. A child protection policy of zero tolerance were zero release = zero re-offenders, all convicted pedophiles must die in prison. Rack ’em , stack ’em and pack ’em. Let ’em rot were they drop.
Shame on the RANN lead SA Govt. for commissioning at the cost of over $600,000.oo, ROBYN LAYTON’S ‘Keeping the children safe’ report to WHITE WASH the past crimes against thousands of STATE WARDS, as revealed later in the MULLIGHAN Commission.
The only other sadness about this topic is there is only one Freda Briggs. You are such an inspiration to everyone who cares about kids. Thank you from the bottom of my heart.
This lady is exactly who I aspire to be!! I’m on my road to studying so I can also advocate on behalf of children in family law and child safely. You truly are an inspiration!!
I will fight along side of you, because I know first hand how flawed our justice, system, family court and child protection systems are!