National Child Protection Week 2025

This year’s National Child Protection Week theme of ‘Shifting Conversation to Action’ reflects feedback from children and young people who want to know the adults in their lives understand how to step up and take tangible action to keep them safe from harm.

We all have a role to play in ensuring every child and young person has the opportunity to grow up safe and free from harm. Practitioners and workers in services that don’t specialise in family and domestic violence (FDV) are still likely to encounter women and their children affected by family violence. So, it’s important to gain the appropriate skills to engage parents in initial conversations where FDV is a presenting issue.^{1, 2}

Emerging Minds foundation course The impact of family violence on the child introduces the use of child-aware and parent-sensitive approaches for engaging with parents. These approaches consider children’s experiences of FDV to prevent these children being ‘invisible’ to services.

The subsequent practice course, Child-aware practice: Family and domestic violence, offers a conversation guide to assist your engagement with parents who are living with FDV to enquire about their children’s social and emotional wellbeing.

Non-Indigenous practitioners working with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander families experiencing FDV may wish to take a look at the course Honouring Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander voices in healing family violence. The course is designed to help you think about the whole family – their hopes, aspirations, strengths and stories of connections to family, kinship, Country and culture – as well as family histories of problems, challenges and trauma, in discussing family violence.

While this area of work presents challenges, we can take tangible steps to prevent harm by practicing in ways that actively consider the safety and wellbeing of children in families where FDV is present.