Intrafamilial child sexual abuse training

This course series will help frontline professionals recognise, understand, respond to and prevent sexual abuse in the family environment. The courses focus on adults who pose a risk to children of all ages and stages, including pre- and non-verbal children. The courses are designed to be taken in sequence. 

Course 1: Understanding child sexual abuse

Definitions, prevalence and statistics, and the impact on children and families.

Course 2: Adults who pose a risk

Understanding Finkelhor's four pre conditions to sexual abuse. This course covers models of offending, grooming, managing lower-level concerns, online and offline risk, transferable risk, risk within the family.

Course 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.

Course 4: The child at the centre

Understanding the voice of the child. This course covers children of all ages, including babies and infants. It centres the child, exploring what, how and why children communicate. 

Course 5: Adults who work with children

The roles of paid professionals and volunteers. This course 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.

Course 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 courses mention 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. 

This course series is designed for frontline professionals working or volunteering in universal, targeted and specialist services.

This includes people working in:

• children's services
• police
• education
• multi-agency partnerships
• healthcare.

At the NSPCC, we work to keep children and young people safe from abuse and neglect every day.

As experts in safeguarding and child protection, we understand the issues organisations and people working with children can face. That’s why professionals trust us to provide the support, training and resources they need to help protect the children and young people they work with.

Our highly-rated training courses are developed by experts. We work with a number of organisations, experienced consultants and subject matter experts in a range of sectors to develop courses that are clear, easy-to-use, up-to-date and in line with the latest statutory guidance, and tailored to your needs.

And as a charity, income generated from the sale of our training courses is reinvested back into the NSPCC to help protect children.

Our online courses will work in most browsers, though we recommend that you use Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge or Safari (not Firefox). You will need to make sure your browser is up to date for the course to run.

This course can be taken on PCs and Macs, as well as iPads or other tablet devices. Please note, we are unable to provide full technical support for tablet users. We do not support other mobile devices.

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Call us on 0116 234 7246 or email learning@nspcc.org.uk if you have any questions.