Interviewing young people on sensitive topics: An iterative approach

What is this about?

In 2015, a Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse was established to understand the nature and extent of sexual abuse that occurred in Australian institutions and to determine ways that past failures might be avoided into the future. In addition to private sessions with survivors, public forums and case studies that investigated occurrences of abuse and organisation’s responses the Royal Commission implemented an ambitious research agenda to gather new knowledge to enhance strategies for identifying and responding to child sexual abuse. As part of this agenda, the Royal Commission contracted us to complete a series of studies to understand how children and young people think about and experience safety and ways that they would like adults and organisations to prevent abuse and respond when children are harmed. One group of children and young people who were deemed most vulnerable to institutional child sexual abuse, peer sexual violence and exploitation were those living in residential care. Understandably, the Royal Commission and various stakeholders and gatekeepers were anxious about researchers engaging children and young people about issues such as child sexual abuse. In addition to concerns that discussing such topics might be triggering for survivors of abuse, stakeholders were fearful that in participating in the study some young people would be introduced to content and safety threats to which they had not previously been exposed. However, the Royal Commission was adamant that children and young people should be provided an opportunity to engage in this important discussion.

For whom is this important?

Research Ethics Committeesresearchers

Other information

When

2021