Bright Futures workshops are a space for learning and building connections with the primary purpose of keeping children safe from abuse. Bright Futures’ workshops explore what harmful sexual behaviours are, their impact on children, and provide an opportunity to develop practical skills to confidently approach issues and implement effective outcomes.

Bright Futures workshops are designed for teachers and front-line professionals who directly interact with children or work with children or child safety roles within government and non-government organisations.

This full day, interactive workshop will be grounded in a public health approach to problematic and harmful sexual behaviours.

We aim to increase participants’ understandings of problematic and harmful sexual behaviours by:

Defining and discussing age-appropriate sexual development, problematic and harmful sexual behaviours, and the various tools used to categorise these behaviours.
Using Australian context-specific examples, we will outline what a public health approach to preventing problematic and harmful sexual behaviours means.
Providing a sensitive and thoughtful space in which to discuss specific experiences and issues encountered by participants’ in their professional capacities.

09:00 – 09:30 Arrival and Registration

09:30 – 10:00 Introduction to Bright Futures

10:00 – 11:00 Sexual Development and Behaviours in Children and Young People

11:00 – 11:20 Morning tea

11:20 – 12:50 Introduction into Harmful Sexual Behaviours

12:50 – 13:30 Lunch

13:30 – 15:00 The Public Health Approach to Harmful Sexual Behaviours

15:00 Communities of Practice / Workshop Close

Presented by

Beth McNamara, National Education Manager, Daniel Morcombe Foundation

Beth is a qualified social worker (1 Hons, USYD) who lives and works on beautiful Gubbi Gubbi/Kabi Kabi country. She has worked in violence prevention for 18 years, specifically in the areas of child sexual abuse and domestic and family violence. A career highlight was working at the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse, from its inception in 2013 to its conclusion in 2017, as a counsellor and lead policy writer. In her current role as National Education Manager for the Daniel Morcombe Foundation, Beth oversees a number of primary prevention projects which aim to enhance national approaches to child safety education. She also sits on the QLD Child Death Review Board and the QLD Harmful Sexual Behaviours Network.

Sam Ivancsik, Collective Member, Yamurrah

Sam is a proud Wiradjuri woman living on the beautiful South Coast of NSW, whom identifies as queer and uses the pronouns she/her. Sam completed a Bachelor of Social Work in 2012 at the University of Western Sydney and has worked across a range of different services in counselling roles. She has worked with children, young people and families for over a decade in the prevention against violence, abuse and neglect- an area she is extremely passionate about.

Sam has specialised skills and experience working in child protection, domestic family violence, sexual assault and with children and young people whom have sexually problematic/ and or harmful behaviours. She has an interest in working with LGBTQIA+, neurodivergent and First Nations individuals.

Sam holds a strong belief that traditional 'talking therapy' can only assist individuals to a certain extent and has spent the last five years integrating technology and somatic based therapies into her daily clinical practice, such as biofeedback focusing on heart wave variability and safe sound protocol.