Karen Keavy
KAREN KEAVY is an educator, counsellor, children’s author and child advocate who specialises in wellbeing and trauma associated with abuse. She is passionate about children’s wellbeing and in ensuring that all children have the necessary education to help protect them from various kinds of abuse and neglect.
“Working with children and adult survivors, I know the devastating effects child sexual abuse, and particularly intra-familial sexual abuse can have. As a result, I am passionate about ensuring that all children receive nationally consistent, contemporary Protective Behaviours and Sex Education from pre-school until the final year of their education.
Unfortunately, due to a host of reasons, this kind of education isn’t occurring for a vast majority of our children. This must change. We need change on a national level and we need that change to filter down to a state level and into all of our preschools, primary and secondary schools. This kind of education belongs in schools and every child needs to know how to recognise abuse, how to speak up and to whom. They also need to know that it’s important to keep telling until the abuse stops. This is important because sometimes a child will disclose and either through misunderstanding, ambiguity due to the language they’re using, denial on the part of the adult or other reasons, the child isn’t taken seriously, and the adult doesn’t act on the child’s disclosure.
And with COVID-19 now a part of our everyday reality, we urgently need a nationally consistent approach to this kind of education because, for many of our children, lockdowns mean being locked down with someone who is abusing them.
This has been reflected in the recent statistics regarding child sexual abuse occurring as a result of lockdowns. In Victoria alone, there has been an increase of 70% of reported cases of intra-familial sexual abuse to Kids Helpline. We can’t allow this to continue happening. Our children deserve so much better.
“I met No Laughing Matter Founder/Producer Tanya Lee quite by chance. I was arranging the launch for my children’s book ‘Angel’, (a book about a young girls’ experience of intra-familial sexual abuse) and met Sue Underwood, Fiona O’Loughlin’s Publicist/Manager. Sue suggested I contact Tanya and that is how our friendship started. I admire her so much for what she is doing - she is so strong. I remember talking to her early on about how difficult it is for people to have conversations about intra-familial child sexual abuse. It really has only been very recently that the media has covered topics such as child sexual abuse and sexual assault in great detail. As difficult as is for people to understand and accept child sexual abuse and sexual assault, intra-familial child sexual abuse is that much harder to understand because the perpetrator is a family member. People generally don’t understand intra-familial sexual abuse and for that very reason, we need to shine a light on this type of abuse for awareness and education to occur.
