Practice guide | Understanding harmful sexual behaviours: a layered continuum
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2024
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Paton, A.
Bromfield, L.
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The Australian Child Maltreatment Study showed that 1 in 4 Australian young people had experienced some form of child sexual abuse, and that approximately half of these cases involved sexual harm caused by another child or young person (Mathews et al., 2023; Mathews et al., 2024). Educators, medical professionals, carers, youth workers, law officers, family support and child protection practitioners, therapists and counsellors are all likely to encounter and need to respond to children’s sexual behaviour. This Practice Guide is intended to assist users to better understand and respond to harmful sexual behaviours (HSB) – to determine whether the behaviour they have encountered is HSB, and if so, how worried they should be, and who is best placed to respond. It is designed for non-HSB specialists working with children and young people across a range of settings. Following a brief definition of what HSBs are, the Guide takes users through the different elements that need to be considered in a series of ‘steps’ that comprise the layered approach to understanding harmful sexual behaviour.In developing this Practice Guide, the authors have considered research, data, and practice knowledge (see Paton and Bromfield, developing the continuum, including a study specifically designed to help us test and refine this continuum (Thain, Paton and Bromfield, in progress). The field of HSB is rapidly evolving and the evidence base is growing. This Practice Guide represents the second version of the Layered continuum and comprises some important revisions to Paton and Bromfield’s (2022) original Layered Continuum.
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Copyright 2024 University of South Australia