Keeping Ourselves Safe

A Talk by Owen Sanders QSM
National Manager, New Zealand Police Youth Education Service
August 4, 1997


What is Keeping Ourselves Safe?

Keeping Ourselves Safe is New Zealand's national child abuse prevention programme for schools.

The distinctive feature about the way it operates is as an association between the Youth Education Service of the New Zealand Police and schools. The objectives of Keeping Ourselves Safe are threefold:
  • To teach youngsters understandings and skills they need to keep safe when meeting other people
  • To encourage those involved in abuse to seek help
  • To raise awareness in the adult community of the need to keep young people safe

Keeping Ourselves Safe uses a social skills approach that draws from social learning and social control theory. As students experience the programme at school they will learn:
  • To assess risky situations
  • Safe practices to use when meeting other people
  • To ask for help if they are being threatened or abused
  • To set personal and family rules for keeping safe
  • That abuse is never acceptable
  • That abuse is never their fault
  • To go on asking until they get help
  • To build safe relationships

Hesitant Beginnings – Mixed Reactions

1 First Sparks Keeping Ourselves Safe began development in the early 1980s after it became increasingly evident that existing strategies to protect children from abuse were inadequate.

Specifically, I recall it beginning one afternoon when police education officer Constable Karen Holland stormed into my office, sat down in front of my desk and described with great passion her frustration with "stranger danger" lessons she had been taking in a Wellington high school. "It is just not good enough, Owen," she said. Then, "What are you going to do about it?" followed.

A challenge indeed. Karen was in a good position to judge the worth of child abuse prevention strategies. She had been a teacher before becoming a police officer and was also active in the Wellington Rape Crisis Centre. And Karen was right to see that there was a problem to be addressed. What police were doing was inadequate as an educational strategy. It was also failing to respond to the increasing awareness of the incidence of abuse that in the early 1980s New Zealanders were beginning to appreciate.

2 Increasing Rates of Child Abuse / Increasing Reporting of Child Abuse

New Zealanders read about the increasing evidence from the United States that up to one in four women was sexually abused as a child. Was it really possible that this was also happening in our country?

Unfortunately it became increasingly clear that it was.
  • Surveys, such as the Otago Women Health Survey of 1989/1990, found that nearly 20% of the women surveyed reported sexual abuse as children involving at least genital contact. Another 6% reported inappropriate touching or kissing, and a further 7% reported incidents that did not involve physical contact, such as exposure, or being asked to do something sexual.
  • Police experienced an increase in the reporting of child abuse, so great that special child abuse teams have had to be set up. National legislation was changed to give children greater protection.
  • For some reason newspapers seemed to be reporting cases of abuse with increasing frequency. It is now the norm to see these cases in daily newspapers.

During the 1980s people wrote to me claiming I was exaggerating the incidence of abuse. I have not had a letter like that for years now. With the last one I received, I suggested the writer contact the local Police Child Abuse team and ask them what is happening in the local community. If the writer had done that then he would have been left with no illusions as to the incidence of abuse.

New Zealanders now accept the reality and frequency of child abuse: sexual abuse, physical abuse and bullying, psychological abuse, and neglect are unfortunately features of our society.

3 Persuading Police

Police have been concerned about the safety of children for a long time now. A delightful story comes from the 1860s, the very early years of policing in New Zealand, when a constable found a mother, ill in a hovel and with no one to care for her hungry and ill clad children. Police reports show that the constable arranged for the woman to go to hospital and for the children to receive care.

In part, this concern comes from the fact that many police are themselves parents and caregivers. More importantly, I think it comes from the nature of policing, which frequently deals with children as the victims of abuse and neglect. Consistent with problem-oriented and community-oriented policing objectives, it is entirely appropriate for police to become involved in helping society deal with child abuse. Schools, where children are and where strong links exist with families, are a productive context to do this in.

Because society's concerns about keeping children safe carry strong emotions and anxieties, part of the police role can be to help put the nature of the risk in a proper perspective. Child abduction and murder is, fortunately, rare in New Zealand. The greatest risks to the safety of children are on our roads and in youngsters' homes. For abuse, the greatest risk is from the people they know, including their caregivers. A report prepared for the New Zealand Department of Social Welfare in 1996 estimated that 16% of all New Zealand households were abusive and 1 in 3 of the children in those homes suffered long-term emotional damage. Annually, 20 children die at the hands of their caregivers or through suicide. New Zealand has one of the highest rates of youth suicide in the western world.

Police agencies in a number of countries have traditionally used a "stranger danger" approach when helping the community keep children safe. This approach has now been found to be so inadequate it is hard to find any justification for continuing to use it. But, in New Zealand, it is proving exceedingly difficult to stamp out. Some time ago, a child psychologist was being interviewed about child safety on radio. She admitted that in her professional opinion "stranger danger" was inadequate but then went on to say she would probably still teach it to her own children. The deep-seated anxieties for the safety of children do not take long to surface.

It can be argued that "stranger danger" is not just inadequate but downright dangerous. Some of New Zealand's young murder victims might well be alive today if they had sought help from a "stranger" when being attacked by someone they knew. If a youngster falls off his or her bike outside your house and needs help, do you refuse because you are a "stranger"?

It was not difficult to persuade police that a child abuse prevention programme for schools would be worthwhile. Police became active in lobbying government and the Department of Education to clear the way for development to begin.

4 Persuading Education

I still have in my mind a clear picture of the first meeting Police had with the Department of Education to seek approval to develop a child abuse prevention programme for our primary schools (youngsters aged 5 –12 years). The two officials listened and then with some mild amusement patiently explained that anything to do with sex abuse could not be taught in primary schools because of the strict ban on anything that could be construed as sex education. They suggested that Police think about doing it with older students, in secondary schools. There, sex education restrictions were less severe.

As an aside, I should give you some appreciation of these restrictions in the early 1980s. Primary schools were instructed that sex education was not to be part of the school curriculum. One teacher had been sacked after holding up a confiscated copy of Playboy in front of his class and trying to explain why the pictures contained in it were offensive to women. Teachers were scared of doing anything in their class that might be seen as sex education. However, Police were determined to start a comprehensive child abuse prevention programme with young children and tried to argue that teaching about sex abuse was not sex education. Educators and teachers remained apprehensive.

An impasse continued until, in 1982, the Director of the New Zealand Mental Health Foundation invited an Assistant Commissioner of Police to a meeting with the Minister of Education, held to discuss the need for child abuse prevention in schools. Although the Minister at that time was known as a conservative politician, he indicated that he was aware of the problem of child abuse and agreed something should be done. As a result, he wrote to his officials in the Department of Education and asked them to work with Police to develop a suitable programme.

A major breakthrough had been achieved but many problems remained. Not the least of which was how the programme could operate in primary school classes where the curriculum banned sex education. In the end it required legislative change and a new Health Syllabus. Trials of the draft primary school programme were held up for over a year just waiting for the New Zealand parliament to amend the Education Act. Can you imagine how frustrating that was? I recall sounding off about it at a meeting one night only to find out later that the official responsible for that decision was in the audience.

All Keeping Ourselves Safe programmes are totally indigenous to New Zealand. They have been written by working parties of New Zealand teachers and educators. Draft programmes have been sent to a wide range of government and community groups as part of a consultation phase and school trials conducted and evaluated. Only then are the final contents decided on and the programmes produced.

5 Persuading the Community

I am convinced that the great majority of people in the community supported the development of Keeping Ourselves Safe but that is not how it often felt while developing it. Many times I prayed that the silent majority would be a little less silent. Whatever, I knew from the surveys of parents and caregivers that the majority not only supported but welcomed Keeping Ourselves Safe. I remember one parent writing, "Thank you teachers for beginning this difficult subject for us. We can now follow up in our homes." Typically, in a primary school of several hundred parents and caregivers there would be a few with reservations.

Mind you, what we were presenting in school classrooms was fairly explicit and certainly a new experience for many teachers. ... Some, both men and women, were concerned that Keeping Ourselves Safe might encourage children to label all men, abusers. Dads have said that they no longer feel comfortable about having their daughter on their knee and some men have felt that the programme might encourage girls to make false complaints. There is little evidence that this has happened. The programme deliberately models men helping and protecting children as well as harming them. Also, women are shown as offenders, initially as offenders of physical abuse but more recently also as offenders of sexual abuse. I guess, since the 1980s, our view of sex abuse has changed from, female victims and male offenders to, male and female victims and male offenders, to now recognising that there are female as well as male offenders. As a mere male, I hesitate to comment too much on female offenders of sex abuse but my good friend, Professor Freda Briggs from the University of South Australia, says women offenders are underrecognised. She has been working with male sex offenders in Australian prisons and has found that women abused a significant number, when they were young. We have had some high-profile cases recently in New Zealand that certainly make one wonder. In the secondary school Keeping Oursleves Safe programmes, we include one situation where a woman sexually hassles and makes advances to a young man.

It is an unfortunate fact that serious cases of child abuse do increase interest in Keeping Ourselves Safe. In New Zealand the sexual abuse and murder of youngsters is relatively rare, so when it happens its impact on the community is considerable.

All too often, support for Keeping Ourselves Safe has come after the violation and murder of some young New Zealander.
  • Teresa Cormack's death near Napier in 1987 resulted in a trust that funded one of the key video resources of the programme for 5- and 6-year-olds.
  • The loss of little Sarah Curry in Southland changed attitudes to Keeping Ourselves Safe, almost overnight.
  • The Karla Cardno trust, established after the murder of teenager Karla in 1989, was primarily responsible for resourcing the secondary school Keeping Ourselves Safe programmes. Without the activities of this trust it is hard to see how these programmes would ever have been completed.

I acknowledge with sadness, the debt we owe to Teresa, Sarah, and Karla and all other young victims of violence.

Implementing Keeping Ourselves Safe

1. Present Extent of the Programmes

Keeping Ourselves Safe is now available to youngsters from age5 years to the late teens. The five Keeping Ourselves Safe programmes are:

Knowing What to Do (age 5 to 7 years)
Getting Help (age 8 to 10)
Standing Up for Myself (age 11 to 12)
Dealing With Risk (younger teens)
Building Safe Relationships (older teens)

Each programme consists of a multimedia kit containing a teaching guide and a range of print, video, and picture resources.

As well, other programme materials have been developed for teacher training.

There is no doubt that many schools have found Keeping Ourselves Safe difficult to implement. I know of schools that have taken up to a year to complete just the preparation tasks. That is, before any teaching begins. Training teachers about the nature of abuse has proved to be as big a task as obtaining parent support. I recall one teacher telling me how she stood in front of a mirror and said aloud the correct names of the sexual parts of the body, over and over again, until she could use the words without embarrassment. In another school 15 of the 17 staff recounted instances of abuse that had happened to them as youngsters. That took some working through, but when they had, they told me the staff had developed a sense of corporate support and unity none had experienced in any other school.

Teacher training is now done with the support of school health nurses, child protection social workers, police from child abuse teams, and volunteers from community abuse agencies such as Rape Crisis and HELP. Special teacher training courses are also conducted at New Zealand Colleges and Schools of Education, the institutions where teachers train.

2. Police and Keeping Ourselves Safe

Schools obtain Keeping Ourselves Safe from their local police education officer who is required to introduce the programme to the school and explain the steps that need to be taken to prepare for its teaching. These steps include:
  • Teachers exploring what they need to know about child abuse in their school community and their feelings about abuse
  • Becoming familiar with the teaching module they will be using
  • How the school will consult with and involve parents and caregivers
  • How child abuse that comes to notice will be reported
  • Anticipating children's questions especially questions about sexuality
  • Evaluating the programme

The school's health coordinator is always a key person to involve at this beginning stage. The school staff will also want to consult with their Board of Trustees and the police education officer may be asked to assist with this.

After the required introduction, the involvement of police education officers is optional. Some assist with the staff preparation, especially with helping the school establish links with agencies in the community that can assist when cases of abuse come to notice. Without mandatory reporting of child abuse in New Zealand, this needs to be done school by school. Then, if time permits, police education officers may assist teachers with the classroom teaching.

Police education officers are also responsible for reminding schools when Keeping Ourselves Safe is due to be taught again and for providing further materials and ongoing support when that happens.

3. Parents / Caregivers and Keeping Ourselves Safe

Involving parents and caregivers in Keeping Ourselves Safe has been a priority objective. Only when home and school work together will youngsters be given consistent safety messages. As well, parents and caregivers need to learn about child abuse, so they can respond positively when their children tell them about unwanted touching.

Fortunately, the junior classes in New Zealand schools have a strong tradition of involving parents and caregivers in the classroom. With Keeping Ourselves Safe we have tried to build on that, but it has not always been easy. In many families the adults work and are not able to participate at schools. Schools can become discouraged when the parents and caregivers they would most like to involve never turn up. The involvement of Police in Keeping Ourselves Safe seems to result in greater parent / caregiver interest and participation.

Many New Zealand schools are very skilled at working with their parents and caregivers. In the junior Keeping Ourselves Safe programme, these ideas are suggested:
  • Distribute the parent / caregiver pamphlets to all families.
  • Show the introductory video at a parent / caregiver meeting.
  • Ask the school trustees or parent teacher association to help you contact all families.
  • Involve the school health nurse who has valuable contacts with school families.
  • Send letters home or telephone all parents and caregivers when you are dealing with some sensitive part of the programme.
  • Arrange for a special occasion when parents and caregivers, and their children, can come to the classroom.
  • Use school newsletters to keep parents and caregivers informed about the objectives of the programme and what is happening in their youngsters' classes.
  • Toward the end of the programme, discuss with parents and caregivers how they think their youngsters are coping. Find out what follow up might be needed.
  • Introduce the home book for parents / caregivers.

The home book has been most successful at encouraging parents and caregivers to become involved in the programme at home. It is a personalised scrapbook on which a home sheet is pasted after each lesson. The sheet informs parents what was taught in the lesson and includes follow up activities to be completed at home and then brought back to class.

4. Teachers and Keeping Ourselves Safe

The teaching manuals provide a range of interactive teaching activities, which allows the programme to be individualised to the needs of each class. Students start with activities that reinforce the knowledge understandings and skills they already have; move on to learning new knowledge, understandings, and skills; and then use stories and video vignettes to provide practise at applying these to real-life situations.

Keeping Ourselves Safe has also been designed to meet the requirements of the Ministry of Education's health curriculum. Teachers see it as having a natural and legitimate place in their classroom programmes and the Education Review Office, which audits New Zealand schools, frequently reminds schools to use it.

Despite the challenges and difficulties, Keeping Ourselves Safe has happened, but I don't want to give the impression that it is ever finished. One of the exciting things about the programme in New Zealand is that its development has been linked to a programme of independent evaluation and then redevelopment. Two of the original modules have already been completely rewritten, and that process will continue.

Does Keeping Ourselves Safe Work? What the Evaluation Community Has to Say

A number of evaluations have been conducted into the effectiveness and operation of Keeping Ourselves Safe.

Woodward, in 1990, interviewed the principals, teachers, police education officers, and some parents / caregivers of two Dunedin schools. One school had successfully taught Keeping Ourselves Safe, and the other had not proceeded after a meeting with parents and caregivers became difficult. I understand that this meeting ended in a shouting match after which some parents left. Woodward pointed out the importance of consulting and informing both teachers, parents, and caregivers thoroughly. After a careful literature search she recommended that child abuse prevention should be taught within a context of sex education, an ongoing difficulty for Keeping Ourselves Safe because of the restrictions on sex education at that time.

Van Kessel, also in 1990, examined the reactions of children to Keeping Ourselves Safe in an Auckland school. She was concerned to see if claims that the programme would frighten or upset young children were true. No significant negative changes were observed. Parents and caregivers considered the programme had a good overall effect, and all reported it had led to discussion and the sharing of safety messages at home. This was a most encouraging result.

In 1991, Professor Freda Briggs, from the University of South Australia, interviewed 252 New Zealand children aged 5 - 8 years who came from:
  • Schools that had not taught Keeping Ourselves Safe at all
  • Schools that had taught "bits" of it
  • Schools that had taught it completely and thoroughly

Not unexpectedly, she found that Keeping Ourselves Safe was most effective when taught by committed teachers and when the safety skills in the programme become part of the culture of a school. She noted that in one school this had happened to such an extent that five-year olds arrived at school for their first day already familiar with the safety strategies the school followed. Briggs found the inadequate concept of "stranger danger" was still deeply embedded in New Zealand society.

In 1993, Briggs and Hawkins reported on follow up interviews one year later, with 117 of the original 252 children. The results summary included: "There is evidence that the Keeping Ourselves Safe programme increased skills and knowledge in areas associated with self-protection in the short term. Assessment a further 12 month after the programme suggests that children go on to make extra skill and knowledge gains." From this 1993 study Briggs and Hawkins recommended:
  • That all schools should teach Keeping Ourselves Safe
  • Schools use police education officers to help facilitate and support its use
  • Increasing parent / caregiver participation
  • Revising the first programme for 5- to 6-year-olds
  • Improving teacher enthusiasm as a critical variable

The programme for 5- to 6-year-olds was revised in 1994.

Louise Perniski evaluated Keeping Ourselves Safe with 137 11- and 12-year-old students from three Wellington schools in 1995. She used a Children's Knowledge of Abuse Questionnaire and role-play scenarios to determine whether children could distinguish between appropriate and inappropriate situations. Results indicated that all children involved in the programme showed significant increases in knowledge at post-test. Perniski concluded that the study provided support for both, the need for formal abuse prevention education and for Keeping Ourselves Safe as an effective way of doing that. She also noted that abuse prevention education should include prior sex education and parent / caregiver education.

Also in 1995 a team of researchers led by Professor Briggs undertook an evaluation of the same 11- to 12-year-old programme. Ten schools from Dunedin, Nelson and New Plymouth took part, including a school for "special risk" youngsters; 252 children and 142 parents / caregivers were interviewed. Among the general findings were:
  • Virtually all the parents, caregivers, and children supported Keeping Ourselves Safe.
  • Participation was seen as increasing children's confidence and openness.
  • Very few children felt embarrassed or anxious.
  • All students knew that sexual abuse was reportable.
  • Some children had already encouraged victims to report.
  • Children could give examples of how the programme had helped them avoid or report abuse.
  • It is possible to teach Keeping Ourselves Safe to students who have learning difficulties.
  • There was evidence that abused children had reported sexual abuse after the programme.

Evaluators noted that the input from police education officers was greatly appreciated by schools and parents / caregivers alike, saying that they ensured teachers, parents, caregivers, and children took the problem of children's safety seriously. The input of male police education officers was perceived as being especially valuable for boys.

A revised programme for ages 11 and 12 was published this year.

Bibliography

Briggs F, Child protection programmes: Can they protect young children? Early Child Development and Care, Vol 67, pp 61 -72, 1991.

Briggs F, Keeping Ourselves Safe. A Personal Safety Curriculum Examined SET, No 2, 1991, New Zealand Council for Educational Research.

Briggs F and Hawkins R, Follow-up data on the effectiveness of Keeping Ourselves Safe when used with children of 5 - 8 years University of South Australia, 1993.

Briggs F and Hawkins R, Keeping Ourselves Safe A Survey of New Zealand School Children Aged 10 - 12 Years and their Parents University of South Australia, 1996.

Briggs F and Hawkins R Keeping Ourselves Safe Who Benefits? SET Special 5, New Zealand Council for Educational Research, 1996.

Carter David L, Community Policing and D.A.R.E.: A Practitioner's Perspective U.S. Department of Justice, 1995.

Perniski L, Child Protection Programmes: What Do Children Learn and Remember? Keeping Ourselves Safe - An Evaluation with Follow Up Victoria University of Wellington, 1995.

Van Kessel K, An Evaluation of the Side Effects of Keeping Ourselves Safe, A Child Abuse Prevention Programme University of Auckland, 1990.

Woodward J, Evaluating the Implementation of the Keeping Ourselves Safe Child Sexual Abuse Prevention Education Programme, University of Otago, 1990.

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