Bright Futures Cairns Workshop 2024

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.

The Cairns workshop is titled 'Porn is not the norm: Young people, neurodivergence and the impacts of porn' and is presented by Maree Crabbe and Dr Wenn Lawson.

Readily available and aggressively marketed online, exposure to pornography is now mainstream.

For neurodivergent young people, pornography’s influence can be even more challenging. For example, monotropism, the key characteristic of autism, can make autistic young people particularly vulnerable to the impacts of pornography. The messages conveyed by pornography can be a source of confusion and concern, and shape unrealistic and unhealthy sexual understandings and expectations. At its worst, pornography exposure can increase the likelihood of autistic young people becoming a victim or perpetrator of a sexual crime.

This full day workshop will explore pornography’s prevalence and influence, its implications for neurodivergent young people, and how we can support them to navigate respectful, consenting and safe sexuality and relationships in this new reality.

Presenters

Maree Crabbe

Director at It’s Time We Talked – Young people, pornography and sexuality

Dr Wenn Lawson

(PhD), AFBPsS. MAPs – Autistic Consultant and Independent Researcher