Training places available Fetal Alcohol Seminar

April 30, 2008

Interested in Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorders? Due to cancellations, Imaginif and Remedy Psychology can offer three only positions in the next Fetal Alcohol Seminar in Cairns (19.5.08): Effects of alcohol on childhood development.

First three registration forms returned will be given the available position. Please complete the forms and fax back to Imaginif as soon as possible.

Pre seminar reading can be accessed here.

Posted by Megan | Filed Under Blog, Training | Leave a Comment

Imaginif’s Sydney trip postponed

April 30, 2008

Paul and I are due in Sydney next week for business discussions around our impending surprise. However, even though flights are booked and paid for, we are unfortunately delaying our trip for a few weeks. Imaginif is in the middle of another immediately important piece of business that cannot be put off or date changed. It is one of the pitfalls of small business - meeting deadlines is more difficult when there are so few people to cover all areas of core business.

My utmost apologies to those people in Sydney we were meeting with. Know that our time here is instead being used to enhance the reason we were going to Sydney in the first place. Further, a delay now gives me time to organise some trainings in Sydney.

Speaking of training: Have you booked for the BITSS trainings in Cairns yet? To those in colder climes, a training in our tropical paradise may be just what is needed to keep you going through your cold southern winters. Affordable accomodation only meters away from the Imaginif offices will help to make your Cairns training trip one that you are sure to never forget: Red Jensen.

Posted by Megan | Filed Under Blog, Imaginif business, Training | Leave a Comment

Child Protection and World Day for Safety and Health at Work

April 28, 2008

Today, Monday, 28 April 2008, is World Day for Safety and Health at Work; an international campaign to promote safe, healthy, and decent work. Occupational health and safety is a real concern for individual workers, advocacy groups and many employers. While easy to understand the need for occupational health and safety in developing and under developed countries, our seemingly sophisticated and advanced work practices often leave much to be desired. Work can indeed be a hazardous place at times.

Child protection focused workers (statutory and non statutory) face daily occupational hazards: abuse of children and systemic abuse of families. With a high propensity toward compassion fatigue and burn out, occupational health and safety should become an ingrained part of our daily work life. It is not just the job of an employer to keep workers safe though, but the responsibility of each of us to keep ourselves safe and protected from the psychological and emotional effects of dealing with the ongoing stress of caring.

The Cost of Caring is also known as Secondary Traumatic Stress, Compassion Fatigue, and Vicarious Traumatisation. While it is not “burn out”, the cost of caring does often lead to burn out. For many front line workers in the social sciences, the impact of working with high-risk children and families is left unaddressed and unacknowledged. Therefore, employers run the risk of having legal and class action taken against them for breaches of occupational health and safety. Flipped on its head though, employers may counter such claims with knowledge that individual employees did not actively participate in their own self care and child protection preservation plan.

Encouraging staff to look after themselves and to remain active in full community life, is our managerial responsibility when working in a sector that does not traditionally retain workers long term. However, it is not up to managers alone - workers also need to stop participating in their own self-care oppression and stay active in managing their own work/life balance.

If you are a worker in the field, do you have a child protection preservation plan? What do you do that keeps you sane and balanced?

There is no better way to combat secondary traumatic stress than to take good care of your physical and mental health.

Self-Care Strategies for Combating Secondary Trauma
YOU (not just your supervisor) can take better care of yourself while at work.
• Take a break during the workday;
• Make quiet time to complete tasks;
• Set limits with your clients and colleagues and diversifying the tasks in your workload can be very helpful;
• Learning to say “no!” is another way of managing stress both at work and in your personal life;
• Learn to read yourself;
• Reflect, reflect, reflect;
• Engage with your work team rather than disengage;
• If you find that you are overwhelmed, set clear boundaries and allow yourself the space and, if possible, time to recover.
• Asking for help also reduces stress.Engage in Healthy/Healing Activities
Engaging in activities that are good for you is essential. You are in control of how you treat yourself. The list below includes things you have heard before and inherently know, but as “helpers” we often forget.
• Eat right. Put down the bag of chips and pick up an apple. Drink less caffeine and more water.
• Exercise regularly. Exercise is a stress reliever. Even if the only exercise you have time for is walking around the parking lot at lunch – try it. You will be amazed at how much better it makes you feel. (It also gets you out of the office, away from the computer, fax, etc.)
• Get enough sleep. Your body needs sleep to recover so that you are better able to handle the stress of a new day.
• Practice relaxation techniques. You know them – deep breathing, visual imagery. We often help our clients find ways to relax. Believe it or not, they’ll work for you too!
• Spend time with friends. “A true friend is someone who is there for you when they would rather be someplace else” Len Wein. Being with people you like and who care about and respect you is a great stress reliever. Allow yourself to enjoy the company of others instead of focusing only on work and work issues.

What are you going to do for yourself today, World Day for Safety and Health at Work? I am going to be time rich rather than time poor (always on the run with no time for reflection). I am going to go for a walk around the Botanic Gardens with my Social Work intern. Feeding our souls by visiting a place of great natural beauty is a reminder that not all the world is an abusive black and that sometimes being surrounded by beauty is what helps our learning fall into place.

Posted by Megan | Filed Under Blog, Motivation | 4 Comments

Emotional intelligence and clear communication for foster carers

April 27, 2008

I love that many people are prepared to foster children. Australia does not make a practice of adopting out children in care and there is a huge need for foster carers to care for kids until they age out of care at 18 years of age. Kids in care also wish for a family to live with, to stay with long term and a family to be safe with. We need lots of foster families - many more than we have now.

A past foster carer myself, I nowadays do some training for foster carers and foster care staff. Yesterday I had the pleasure of training in “Positive and Protective” ways of responding to challenging and traumatised behaviours in children and young people in care.

Additional information on Emotional Intelligence and the formula for clear communication was requested. Here it is. Just click on the links and you will be taken to short articles to further enhance your knowledge on the topic:

Emotional Intelligence 101
A list of feeling words
A sheet of feeling faces
How to listen
How to teach clear communication to children
Emotional Intelligence and feeling words
The Anger Volcano: Anger is a secondary emotion.
What is FASD? (Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorders)

Thanks for fostering children in need of protection. You guys are just the best. If you are interested in investing in the future by becoming a foster carer in the Cairns area, please contact Families Plus: 19 Vallely Street, Freshwater Qld 4870.Telephone: (07) 4058 0433. If you are unable to foster a child in your home then consider financially sponsoring a child in Australia. Family Focus Australia (left) is waiting for your call to help.

Posted by Megan | Filed Under Blog, Training | 2 Comments

Know your Internet Content Provider responsibilities

April 25, 2008

Child Protection is every body’s responsibility. As bloggers or forum managers do you know your responsibility as a content provider or host? If you see, hear of or even suspect, inappropriate online behaviour toward children then the protocol is to report all suspicious activity or knowledge that you may have. This includes any third hand information (if someone tells you that a particular person may be a child sex offender for example) because it is not your responsibility to prove or investigate - just to help keep our kids and internet safe.

On-line Safety is a huge concern for me. Just as sexual predators groom our kids and adults around them in real life, so too do internet sexual predators. Chat rooms, forums, blogs and on-line game messaging are perfect places for those sneaky predators to mask their true colours. Befriending our kids, predators may pose as a similar age, say they have similar interests and skillfully trick our kids into releasing personal information. Similarly, sex predators may befriend us and trick us into trusting them.

Who to report to?

There are several places to report any suspicious online child exploitation or innapropriate behaviour to:

Your local police, but ask to speak to the detectives that look after sexual assaults. Insist that your information gets passed along to the best team to deal with it. Ask for someone to ring you back and let you know it is being followed up.
The Australian Federal Police: I am fortunate to have had a lengthy chat with an Australian Federal Officer from the Online Child Sex Exploitation Team Economic and Special Operations. I wanted to know the process for listing Imaginif’s on-line child protection conversation with the team that monitors on-line activity for child sex predators and exploitive material. The Officer was incredibly helpful and provided me some supportive information about where and how to report any suspicious activity.
The Virtual Global Taskforce is a partnership between police forces from around the world working together to fight online child abuse. Along with offering advice, information and support to both adults and children to protect themselves against child sex abusers the site encourages on-line reporting of any inappropriate or illegal activity with or towards a child online.Created in 2003, The Virtual Global Taskforce, is a direct response to lessons learned from investigations into on-line child abuse around the world. It is an international alliance of law enforcement agencies (Australia, U.S.A, U.K, Canada and Interpol) working together to make the Internet a safer place and it is staffed by specialist police officers and investigators. Once a report is generated, the report will go to straight to them. From there, the report is sent to the country of origin for immediate investigation.Although I am not a supporter of doing things anonymously, I appreciate that many people prefer to make anonymous reports. One of the many advantages of using the Virtual Global Taskforce is that you can make an anonymous report about any suspicious on-line sexualized behaviour toward children.Please, don’t hesitate to use this service if you are concerned about any on-line activity. Investigation and proof is not your responsibility. The global team are trained, professional and passionate. They are the ones tasked with investigating and sorting the innocent from the guilty. The rest of us share the responsibility of reporting exploitive behaviour toward children. Remember,
Child Protection is every one’s business.
Our Statutory Child Protection Departments (i.e: Child Safety, Children’s Services, etc) look after abuse within the family (intrafamilial abuse). The Police look after abuse by people from outside of the family. Sometimes a child may make reference to a family member abusing them (family includes step parents, aunts, uncles and grand parents). This would go straight to the statutory child protection department.
Corrective Services: If you suspect that somebody may be a registered sex offender then they have to live by certain strict rules (i.e: cannot live with children or within certain distance from schools / daycare centres, must apply to change address, etc). You can report any concerns around this to the Corrective Services Department in your state. Australia does not have a public offenders list but Corrective Services monitor and attempt to risk minimise the likelihood of offender recidivism. Unfortunately in Australia, there are many convicted sex offenders operating underground.

Finally, if you have reported to any or all of the above authorities and nothing appears to have happened then you can seek a Ministerial - a Ministerial is an investigation into what has happened with your reports and notifications. You must remember that privacy laws may prevent you from knowing everything but at least a Ministerial asks questions from the highest level and ensures that your concerns have been noted. Each of the previous authorities will have their own Ministers….you may have to seek Ministerial from all the Departments you have contacted if nothing appears to have happened with your notifications. This is a huge task and not something to be undertaken until you have exhausted all other attempts at reporting your concerns to the correct authorities. Contact your local Member of Parliment for help with this task.

This article first appeared in a similar form twelve months ago, at my blogger blog, as Virtual Global Taskforce Against On-Line Sexual Exploitation of Children

Posted by Megan | Filed Under Blog, Child Safety & Protection | 5 Comments