Experts back Sarah Kopp’s call for teacher grooming prevention training
Leading abuse experts have backed a sex abuse survivor’s calls for urgent changes to correct a ‘massive gap’ in teacher training, warning predators are actively targeting schools to access children. SPECIAL REPORT
Expert researchers into childhood sexual abuse are backing calls by grooming victim Sarah Kopp for changes to teacher training in schools, with one labelling the issue a “national blind spot”.
The issue has been thrust back under the microscope after former Queensland high school student Sarah Kopp came forward as a victim of her PE teacher, Paul Edward Grealy, when he started working at her Hervey Bay high school in 2000.
Sarah eventually married Grealy, before leaving him in 2014, and reporting him to police.
He was jailed in May 2024, after being found guilty of five counts of indecent treatment of a child, and one count of maintaining an unlawful relationship with a child.
Queensland University of Technology researcher Dr Jodi Death said there were many more stories like Sarah’s, but the nature of the crimes meant it was often underreported and statistics “really difficult to track down”.
“Disclosure of child sexual abuse often takes years or decades to come out,” Ms Death said.
The most in-depth investigation into the issue, the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse, concluded in 2017, painted a grim picture of the extent of offending in schools across the country.
According to the Commission almost one third (31.8 per cent, or 2186 people) heard in private sessions at the Commission said they were sexually abused in a school-setting as a child.
More than half of these (58.4 per cent) said the perpetrator was a teacher, with 88 per cent of those an adult and almost all of those (96.2 per cent) men.
Survivors told of their abuse happening across more than 1000 schools, of which 44.2 per cent were government run.
Sarah has called for mandatory and improved training in Queensland’s schools, saying the existing program “barely scratches the surface”.
Ms Death welcomed Sarah’s call.
“Even health teachers … only get about three hours training on sex and relationships,” she said.
“The people that are in charge of curriculum delivery on sex and relationships are having minimal training.
“That doesn’t help them have a difficult conversation.”
This was despite research finding young people and survivors “telling us very clearly we want somebody to have these conversations with us”.
She said early intervention, instead of processes which were reactionary and only after people were hurt, was crucial.
“The sooner you can detect a problem, and the sooner you can provide positive intervention and positive belief for survivors … you can minimise the damage that has occurred regardless of the … extent of the sexual harm,” she said.
University of New South Wales Sydney researcher Professor Michael Salter said he backed Sarah’s call for the change in training “100 per cent”.
“It’s a massive gap,” Prof Salter said.
He said the current focus was on peer abuse or the onset of violence in adulthood.
When it came to preventing child sexual abuse by adults it “falls down”, especially in relation to teenagers and high school students.
The problem was not limited to Queensland, where Sarah went to school and lived, either.
“It’s a national blind spot,” Prof Salter said.
“There is a massive lack of research and transparency around rates of sexual abuse and misconduct in schools,” he said.
“At the moment we’ve got better data on victimisation of teachers by students, than we have of students by teachers.”
“We don’t have much transparency across the states and territories from the regulators and the department of education in terms of the information they release about reports and outcomes.”
Ms Death said the biggest barrier was “not actually policy … (but) is cultural change for individuals and institutions”.
University of Melbourne’s Dr Gemma McKibbin said schools across the country were “absolutely falling short” in the fight.
“We’ve made some really positive steps since the Royal Commission … most schools have a pretty good mandatory reporting process … but really what’s lacking is that early intervention, educators being able to recognise the signs of child sexual abuse and take action.
Ms McKibbin said children often made “partial disclosures” and “sit down and say ‘this is exactly what happened to me’”.
Teachers needed to be given the tools to identify these disclosures, or changes in behaviour like a drop in attendance, falling grades, or loss of interest, to know “how best to respond”.
She said it appeared in Sarah’s case her abuser ingratiated himself with other people “like her mother and no doubt his colleagues at the school, so she was in a position where even if she had spoken out, would anyone have believed her?”
Prof Salter said a nationwide survey of almost 2000 Australian men found “that men with a sexual interest in children, who abused children, were almost three times more likely to be working with children”.
“The data is really clear that sexual interest in children is a motive for some men to seek child focused employment.
“At the moment child-focused institutions like schools are not doing enough to detect and eject these men.
“All child-focused institutions need to come to grips with the fact they are differentially targeted by premeditated offenders who want to abuse children and they are seeking to use employment to do it,” Prof Salter said.
“Unless institutions take up the very specific challenge of screening out those sorts of offenders … and if (they) get through the safeguards, identifying and ejecting them as soon as possible, then we’re going to continue seeing cases like Sarah’s.”
