This course will help frontline professionals recognise, understand, respond to and prevent sexual abuse in the family environment. The course focuses on adults who pose a risk to children of all ages and stages, including pre- and non-verbal children. The modules in the course are designed to be taken in sequence.
Module 1: Understanding child sexual abuse
Definitions, prevalence and statistics, and the impact on children and families.
Module 2: Adults who pose a risk
Understanding Finkelhor's four pre conditions to sexual abuse. This module covers models of offending, grooming, managing lower-level concerns, online and offline risk, transferable risk, risk within the family.
Module 3: Protective adults
Working with, and understanding, non-abusing family members. This includes understanding family history, intergenerational considerations, the impact of past trauma, 'normalising' the situation, deception and disguised compliance, and managing difficult conversations.
Module 4: The child at the centre
Understanding the voice of the child. This module covers children of all ages, including babies and infants. It centres the child, exploring what, how and why children communicate.
Module 5: Adults who work with children
The roles of paid professionals and volunteers. This module explores why professionals may have difficulties in understanding and recognising child sexual abuse, professional curiosity and challenge, supervision and reflective practice, self-care and vicarious trauma.
Module 6: Creating safety
Risk assessment and safety planning, with a focus on long-term planning, risk management intervention, multi-agency working and differing agency thresholds, and revisiting risk at times of significant change.
Wider contexts of child sexual abuse
The course mentions sibling harmful sexual behaviour (HSB), however the focus is on adults who pose a risk. You can learn more about identifying and managing incidents of harmful or problematic sexual behaviour in our harmful sexual behaviour in schools elearning courses or our two-day Understanding harmful sexual behaviour training course.
Extrafamilial child sexual abuse is covered in our two-day Understanding child sexual abuse training course.
