National plan to end abuse urged

By MARTIN JOHNSTON health reporter

Therapists are pushing for a co-ordinated national plan to protect children from sexual abuse.

Experts in the field, who finished a three-day conference in Auckland at the weekend, want child sexual abuse to be considered a public-health issue, like HIV-Aids and problem gambling.

The director of the Safe community therapy network, John McCarthy, said many agencies worked in sexual abuse treatment and they were doing fabulous work.

"But there's no overall co-ordinated strategy about where we are all going so there's no plan that will stop sexual violence towards children.

"What we need is a public health strategy talking about primary prevention so we get messages out to mums and dads and people who care for children about how to stop children being sexually abused - what behaviours to look for that are worrying, in adults, in teenagers and in children.

"Then secondary prevention, treating the perpetrators and intervening quickly ... then tertiary prevention, when you intervene with people who have been sexually victimised.

"It's not enough to be patching up abused kids and rehabilitating offenders."

His call for a public-health plan was supported by Professor Mary Koss, a sexual violence expert from the Arizona College of Public Health.

She said sexual abuse victims could be dogged by the effects throughout their lives.

These included taking more sick days off work than others, more medical and mental healthcare visits, and riskier sexual behaviour leading to more teen pregnancies and sexually-transmitted infections.


Justice Minister Phil Goff acknowledged that more needed to be done to educate the public about the nature and effects of sexual abuse. Better tools were needed to pick up early signs of problem sexual behaviour in children and adolescents, to intervene before it was too late.

In speech notes for the conference he said he would soon unveil a plan to reduce community and sexual violence.

A steering group would help to find gaps, such as any unmet need for community- and prison-based services to identify, assess and treat sex offenders.

But Mr Goff also pointed to the successes of some treatment programmes, better co-ordination of how offenders were handled in the community and the plan, under a bill introduced last year, for more restrictive post-prison monitoring of child sex abusers at higher risk of re-offending.

Of the people who went through the community-based treatment programmes Safe and Stop, only 5 per cent reoffended - half the rate of the untreated comparison group.