2025 SA Australian of the Year Leah Bromfield shares how to talk to children about keeping safe

The stats on rising rates of child abuse can be scary, but talking to our kids about staying safe ‘doesn’t have to be complicated’. Read the expert tips here.

Leah Bromfield’s first clear childhood memory is of violence.

She is four years old, crouched beside her baby brother who is strapped into a bouncer on the floor of their family home, and a man is breaking in through the front door.

“To me it sounded like they had a battering ram. I remember the glass breaking and my stepfather standing there with a fire poker in his hand. I saw the glass hitting his hand and blood coming down and then the door opening.”

Bromfield doesn’t remember what happened next but she was so affected by fear that she later lost all her hair.

“The trauma was so significant for me,” she recalls. “And I know that these kinds of memories are the memories of too many kids.”

More than four decades later, Professor Leah Bromfield has forged a career as an internationally renowned child protection expert and advocate, leading inquiries and advising governments while raising two children of her own.

And as the 2025 SA Australian of the Year she is trying to change how we talk about keeping our kids safe. It’s a complex, but urgent, conversation.

Professor and mother-of-two Leah Bromfield says talking to our kids about safety “doesn’t have to be complicated”. Picture: Ben Clark

As it stands, one in every three South Australian children is reported to welfare authorities at some point before they turn 10.

Nationally three in every five children experience at least one form of abuse – physical, sexual, emotional – or neglect before their 18th birthday.

And almost half of teens aged 14 to 17 are being bombarded by sexual messages online.

Having conversations about safety for our kids “doesn’t have to be complicated” though, Bromfield says.

“It isn’t necessarily talking with a three-year-old about what sexual abuse is. It can be things like saying to your three-year-old, ‘That’s a private part of our body, we don’t play with that part of our body in public’.

“Some of these constructs that we’re trying to get across are ‘You can talk to Mum if another grown-up is mean to you, I’ll listen, and I won’t brush you off’.

“And as they get bigger I just keep the conversations going. If you pay attention to the things in their world, the books they’re reading, the TV shows they’re watching, there’s so much fodder within that to have the conversation.”

It would be easy for many Australiansto write off the experiences that lead to children being removed from their parents as things that happen to “other people”. Not in my family. Out-of-sight, out-of-mind.

But Bromfield’s career, and her life, has taught her that some version of that story is playing out in more lounge rooms and back yards than we think.

The fastest growing type of abuse is happeningbetweenchildren, particularly boys, amid an alarming rise in harmful sexualised behaviours.

This trend is being driven, in large part, by access to the internet and increasingly extreme pornography.

The old stranger danger warning now applies less to the neighbour down the street and more to the predator lurking behind your child’s phone or tablet screen.

“We have to raise our kids as responsible digital citizens, aware of the risks,” she says.

“We have to talk to our kids about sex, sexuality, sexual safety in the physical and the virtual world, as well as consent, respectful relationships and bystander intervention.”

The problem is ballooning, but the system we have to deal with it is sorely out of date. Bromfield’s mission, appointed by Child Protection Minister Katrine Hildyard to head the state government’s Child Protection Expert Panel, is to try to drag it not just in to the present but future proof it.`

Child Protection Minister Katrine Hildyard has convened a Child Protection Expert Panel. Picture: NewsWire/Roy VanDerVegt

When Bromfield was born, to a single mother in Hobart in 1978, they were instant candidates for welfare surveillance.

“My mum was a single mum and in those days that was enough for you to be an open case (with authorities),” Bromfield says.

The eldest of four siblings, Bromfield does not count herself as a victim or survivor of childhood abuse, but “life wasn’t always easy” growing up.

Her mother later partnered with her stepfather, who had spent time in jail for a violent offence.

That terrifying day, when Bromfield was four-years-old, was the first time her mother had left the children home alone with him.

Now 47, Bromfield is quick to point out that such violence was “not my daily lived experience”, but says the home environment steadily declined throughout her childhood and eventually her mother made the decision to leave her stepfather.

“We didn’t tell anyone where we were going,” she says.

After a brief stay in a women’s safety shelter, Bromfield’s family fled to Victoria, to the regional hub of Ballarat. (They told people they were moving to Queensland.)

There, a teenage Bromfield “focused all of my endeavours on being normal”.

“We were in a small community. We were so different. I tried so hard, in every way, to just fit in,” she recalls.

Professor Leah Bromfield is the 2025 SA Australian of the Year. Picture: Ben Clark

This was made more difficult by a rare medical condition that affects Bromfield’s sight.

At the age of five she was diagnosed with uveitis – a chronic eye condition which causes severe inflammation – after her right eye filled with blood.

Bromfield lost vision in her right eye at age six and spent decades fighting to protect her left eye from the same fate.

She underwent multiple surgeries including cataract removal in high school, suffered secondary glaucoma while studying psychology at Deakin University and later trialled medications as she started a family with husband Michael after moving to Adelaide. They welcomed son Edward in 2012, while Bromfield was working as deputy director of the Australian Centre for Child Protection (ACCP).

In 2015, just 10 months after the birth of their daughter Madeline, Bromfield suffered a “catastrophic” event in which a build-up of scar tissue and a change in medication led to massive pressure changes and an eventual retinal detachment in her left eye.

“I was diagnosed as legally blind as a consequence of that,” she says.

“I still don’t know how long I’ll be able to see for. I’m just grateful for every year.”

If it was up to Bromfield, we’dblow the whole system up and start again.

“I talk about radical redesign because I think that’s what we need,” she says.

“We have to stop reforming the child protection system that we have. We’ve built it on the wrong foundations.”

The current system was designed to offer a “front door” for reports of child abuse in a time when it was recognised largely as obvious physical or sexual abuse.

Today, that front door – the statewide Child Abuse Report Line – fields more than 100,000 red flags every year spanning parents struggling with poverty, homelessness or mental illness, inflicting verbal and emotional abuse, neglecting their children or putting them at risk through serious drug use.

But in many cases, Bromfield says families need help, not a hard time.

“The child protection system … has a really, really important role to protect children whose parents can’t, or won’t, protect them from harm,” Bromfield says.

“But where a child loves, and is loved by, a parent then we need to do everything we can to support that family unit to remain safely together.” ■

For support phone 1800 RESPECT or Kids Helpline on 1800 55 1800.