Children and young people with harmful sexual behaviours – Dr O’Brien commences ANROWS funded study in collaboration with AIFs.
Deakin criminologist, Dr Wendy O’Brien, has commenced work on a two-year funded research project to examine good practice in delivering and evaluating interventions for young people with sexually abusive behaviours. Funded by the Australian National Research Office on Women’s Safety (ANROWS), in the Perpetrator Interventions Stream, this project is conducted in collaboration with Dr Antonia Quadara, Research Fellow at the Australian Institute of Family Studies.
Young people who engage in harmful sexual behaviors have often experienced a range of adverse experiences in childhood, which may include (but are not limited to) a history of childhood trauma, exposure to domestic and family violence, exposure to pornography, or exposure to caregiver substance abuse. Understanding these complex contexts of risk warrants a shift in emphasis, away from a reliance on criminal justice responses, to providing children and families with specialised therapeutic services. This project will utilise the knowledge of practitioners and other stakeholders to better understand the complex interplay between program design and outcomes and contextual factors that shape therapeutic responses in order to support a practice-informed understanding of good principles of practice in this complex area of therapeutic intervention.
Dr O’Brien appears as expert witness for the Royal Commission on Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse – In October 2016 Dr O’Brien appeared as expert witness for the Royal Commission on Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse. The transcript of Dr O’Brien’s evidence is available here (Transcript Day 215).
Therapeutic responses to children with harmful sexual behaviours have been a focus of Dr O’Brien’s research for many years. A selection of Dr O’Brien’s published work on this topic is available at: The Australian Crime Commission, the Deakin Law Review, Child Indicators Research, and The Conversation.
Incidents of sexual harm among children and young people prompt profound community concern, and the challenges for statutory authorities and parents/caregivers are considerable. There is significant research activity in this field at present, and Dr O’Brien is currently serving on Advisory Boards for two separate research projects to improve responses to children with these behaviours. Dr O’Brien is also working directly with school principals as they develop the professional skills and the protocols necessary to reduce the incidence, and the impacts, of harmful sexual behaviours in schools. In a separate project Dr O’Brien is undertaking a comparative analysis of legal judgments to provide insights into the differential legal and therapeutic responses for children with harmful sexual behaviours in international jurisdictions.