Our Children Deserve Bloody Better

Australian parents are entitled to be bloody furious.

A taxpayer-backed child protection service is directing people towards material that, according to Greg Brown’s report in The Australian earlier this week, tells those struggling with sexual fantasies about children: “Don’t beat yourself up.”

Read that again. Then imagine being a parent whose child has been sexually abused, confronted with publicly supported advice dwelling on the difficulty of giving up fantasies about children.

The words are grotesquely ill-judged. Attorney-General Michelle Rowland owes families something considerably better than a departmental defence.

Brown’s report describes British self-help modules linked from Stop It Now! Australia. One reportedly says that, for many people, abandoning sexual fantasies about children altogether does not feel realistic. It then discusses compassion and self-acceptance.

Children are human beings with an absolute claim to protection. Their innocence must never become something adults are encouraged to accommodate within their sexual lives.

The Australian page itself warns that deliberately engaging with these fantasies reinforces harmful associations. It recommends firm boundaries, including no unsupervised contact with children. Yet that same page directs readers to the British modules and encourages them to explore every section.

That makes the reported reassurance especially troubling. A publicly funded service should deliver a consistent, unmistakable message about resisting the sexualisation of children.

Then comes the comparison with historical attempts to change homosexual attraction.

The module reportedly raises that comparison when discussing efforts to change sexual attraction to children. Whatever clinical question its authors intended to explore, introducing gay conversion therapy into this discussion risks obscuring the decisive moral boundary: children cannot consent to sexual activity with adults.

That boundary must remain absolute. No therapeutic vocabulary can make it negotiable.

Rowland’s spokesman invokes the child sexual abuse royal commission and its recommendation for preventive information and help-seeking services.

A recommendation to establish prevention services does not endorse every sentence subsequently published or linked by a funded organisation. Ministers remain responsible for scrutinising what public money supports. Invoking the royal commission answers none of the questions about this particular material.

According to the report, the government committed $9.6 million to establish the helpline and website, with $4 million available annually thereafter. Australians deserve to know who reviewed the modules, what standards were applied and what evidence supports the disputed wording.

Every dollar carries an obligation to protect children. Every published sentence should meet that obligation. Language that risks giving adults permission to indulge sexual fantasies about children deserves ruthless scrutiny, especially when taxpayers are footing the bill.

Where is the same urgency for the child whose trust is shattered, whose home becomes a place of fear, whose suffering can follow them for decades? Those children have the first claim on our concern, our resources and our government’s resolve.

Rowland should require an immediate independent safeguarding review, suspend links to the disputed material pending that review, and publish its findings alongside the standards governing continued funding. Whoever approved this material should answer publicly for that decision.

Parents should not have to drag these answers out of a government congratulating itself on funding prevention.

Our children deserve bloody better. The minister should start acting like it.

“But whoso shall offend one of these little ones which believe in me, it were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and that he were drowned in the depth of the sea.”
– Matthew 18:6