Thanks to you, as one of our over 12,000 fellow petitioners, we're attracting attention. Demonstrating your continual sharing of our petition is working! We're excited to let you know the CEO of Sexual Assault Services Victoria (SAS Victoria) is meeting with us next week, to discuss the objectives our petition seeks to achieve. SAS Victoria is a peak, non-for-profit body, whose advocacy, education and research work seeks to to help shape and guide systems to ensure service users are able to get the support they need when they need it.
Current services and supports for survivors of childhood sexual abuse in Victoria, are too often funding and service centric i.e. predetermined by who and what is funded to provide, not what individuals, their families, friends and communities, need.
Our petition's goals are aligned with that for SAS Victoria's. "SAS Victoria aims to build a consistent, responsive, quality, coordinated service system, that promote the rights and recovery of victim survivors of sexual assault and addresses the social and systemic factors that contribute to harmful sexual behaviours in children and young people impacted by violence and abuse."
Quoting Michael Salter, Scientia A/Prof UNSW, about approaching child sexual abuse from the point of view of the child (including those now adults) who experiences it.
https://twitter.com/mike_salter
"We have to start talking about child sexual abuse as a pattern of control comparable to domestic violence, rather than just a sequence of sexual acts. Otherwise we miss the fundamental dynamics of abuse between victim and perpetrator, and the subsequent impacts on the victim.
Child sexual abuse often involves a process of entrapment whereby the child's opportunities and capacities for help seeking are systematically foreclosed by the offender. Once this is achieved, he will often say to the victim (correctly) "nobody will believe you".
If the wrong question in domestic violence is "why didn't she leave?", then the wrong question in child sexual abuse is "why didn't she tell?". And yet that expectation is central to child protection and criminal justice responses to child sexual abuse.
The onus is placed on the child victim to somehow transcend the control strategies of the perpetrator, and on the adult survivor to explain or rationalise the effects of those strategies (often by blaming themselves).
Our discourse on violence against women has shifted away from individual responsibility to recognition of the constraints and rational fears that victims must contend with. We aim to expand the space for victims to make their own choices, free from control and coercion.
But we haven't made that shift yet when it comes to child sexual abuse. We don't recognise the patterns of control that sexual abuse sits within and reinforces, because sexual abuse itself gives perpetrators new kinds of control over children - shame, confusion, fear.
Grace Tame has started a critically important conversation about grooming and control, and a lot of people have recognised what happened to them in her story. There's tremendous power in approaching child sexual abuse from the point of view of the child who experiences it."