Claire Moore (Queensland, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

‘It’s all white to say no!’ is the 2009 theme for White Balloon Day, the annual awareness campaign about child sexual assault that has been organised for 13 years by the wonderful Queensland based organisation Bravehearts. The use of the white balloon as a symbol for the issue of child sexual assault followed a public demonstration, which was covered worldwide, in Belgium in October 1996. Members may remember that that Belgian demonstration gathered with white balloons and white flowers as a mark of public sympathy and support for parents of several young girls who were murdered or missing at the hands of a released paedophile.

Bravehearts, the organisations which maintains the white balloon process in Australia, was founded in 1997. It aims to force a movement for change, engaging all our community, governments and the criminal justice sector, to give a real focus on sexual assault in our community. The founder and executive director, Hetty Johnston, joined with Minister Jenny Macklin, MPs, senators, sponsors and supporters at Parliament House on Monday morning to officially launch this year’s White Balloon Day.

As a central element of Child Protection Week, White Balloon Day encourages people to display the balloons and to wear the badges. It is really pleasing to see so many members and senators today wearing the white balloon badge. White Balloon Day works to promote the theme for the 2009 Child Protection Week which is ‘helping child abuse out into the open’. So often there is silence, fear and shame, which mean our most vulnerable children who are victims keep their feelings hidden and do not share their fear and despair.

During the launch of Monday’s Bravehearts’ presentation there was a gut-wrenching visual display which showed images of young children and some of the artwork they used in therapy sessions. There were statements in childish handwriting, such as, ‘Keep me safe,’ ‘Be brave,’ and ‘I am not alone.’ These statements actually call all of us to give these kids a voice. We know we can share their pain, help them keep their pain more public and keep the issues out in the open. We know that the statistics are horrific. When you see that one in five children will be sexually assaulted before their 18th birthday, you know that we must take up this cause.

Part of this year’s Child Protection Week is to engage the whole community in a large survey which has been developed to ask Australians across our nation our views and our understanding of the issues around child abuse. This survey is now online. One of the key messages for all of us is to download this survey and take part in the process because we, as a community, need to have effective data, effective statistics and also an evidence-based basis for us to bring forward better policy. I know that Senator Bilyk will be talking about policy issues around this area in her contribution later, so I will not go into the issues that she will mention. But it is most clear that in the national framework, which has now been developed by the government to look at the issues of child abuse and neglect in our community, we need to have this formulated on an effective evidence base. The results of the survey must be important in that process.

Bravehearts, the community organisation which I mentioned, was formed in Queensland in 1997 and it has a strong record. At the launch on Monday morning we heard from Hetty Johnston, who spoke most clearly and most painfully about her own experience. She became involved in this process because of a family issue; one of her children was sexually assaulted. As a mother, she explained how that affected her and her family. But Hetty, being Hetty, did not just keep her grief to herself; she took action. From that action was formed the organisation Bravehearts. As a Queenslander, I seem to have known Bravehearts forever because there has been such a strong public focus.

Bravehearts now has a whole range of processes which they use, not just in Queensland but nationally, to raise awareness and to be a strong advocate for the issues around child sexual assault. On Monday morning we met Ditto, the very large cat who is the focus of Bravehearts’ activities with children. When we walked through Parliament House on Monday to be part of the launch, the young kids who were in Parliament House waiting for their school trips were drawn to Ditto. They came up and asked questions about what we were doing. With just that small group, we were able to talk about Child Protection Week and what the white balloon meant. They were interested. They were excited by the process and they were asking questions.

This is part of the method that Bravehearts uses across our state. We engage. That is the most important thing. Bravehearts are also very well credentialled advocates and lobbyists for this issue. There is no government member—be it local, state or federal government—who is safe from Bravehearts. If they get you for a moment they will be talking with you about what you can do to take your part in what must be a wider community campaign. The website is also particularly effective, once again interactively engaging people because we cannot turn our backs on this issue. In fact, that is the focus, as I have said, of this year’s Child Protection Week activities.

When I looked at what was happening across my home state of Queensland, it made me so proud to see that, listed on the calendar, there are 14 pages of activities which are occurring this week all across the state; from Mount Isa to North Queensland to various parts of Brisbane and my own hometown of Toowoomba. There are activities which are making public the issues around children’s safety. They are getting people involved, once again drawing people from different backgrounds to think about the issues, to be aware of what is going on and to be there to ensure kids can feel safe and they have people they can turn to if they are afraid or if they fear they could be in danger. The same process also operates for families. As Hetty Johnston says, when a family is affected by this issue and a parent finds out that their own child has been a victim, that whole family needs support through that process. That is certainly one of the things that Bravehearts does.

This year’s Child Protection Week is calling on all of us to take action, to no longer allow these issues to be kept quiet or hidden, and to listen to the children who are working through their own pain. When you see the visual presentations of their own cries for help, their own ways that they need to be understood and supported and their own growing strength as they know that their issues have been acknowledged, we can then understand that these messages which have been out there for so long have actually reached an effective audience. The Australian government is proud, through our process of developing the national framework, to increase the involvement of all state governments as well as the federal government and to ensure that continuing funding goes into the process of support, and most importantly, into research about how we can do better and how we can grow our community.

I think sometimes it is too easy to think that these things happen to someone else. There is no place where child sexual assault does not happen. We have seen in the past that we can a little too easily cause labelling. I want to put on record the comments of my friend Jackie Huggins, from Queensland, who said most clearly that child abuse is not limited to the Aboriginal community. That is something that we must understand. As a whole community, we must see that we have an opportunity to understand these issues better and to take a role through Child Protection Week. If we can take one action in the next week, we can fill in that survey and be part of the evidence base around child protection in our community.