Madeleine West’s new global role to help child sex abuse victims with Crime Stoppers International
Actor Madeleine West has a new weapon in her fight to bring sex predators to justice.
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She has long been a fearless campaigner for child sexual abuse victims after revealing her own harrowing longheld secret in a bid for justice.
Now actor Madeleine West has joined Crime Stoppers International’s Board of Advisors to help prevent and stamp out the sexual exploitation of children and to support the rehabilitation of victims.
The former Neighbours and Underbelly star, who is a mother of six, announced her new role in a powerful Instagram post, urging victims to reach out for help.
“Disclosing abuse, whether current or in the distant past is terrifying … Shame. Blame. Confusion. Fear of the consequences and isolation all conspire to keep you silent,” she wrote.
“But you are not alone, you can take back control of your life, and reclaiming your history promises a better tomorrow.
“We all know the damage abuse does, we all want it to stop, but the only way to achieve that is to ensure our law enforcement, our judiciary, and our politicians understand how it happens, why it happens, how to better handle disclosures and make the victim’s rehabilitation the priority. Not the perpetrator’s.”
West urged victims reporting a crime to go to the Crime Stoppers International website and under crime type select “other” and ask for the case to be directed to her in the first line of the report.
“Change is only possible with the evidence to back it up,” she wrote.
“And so I am asking anyone who has experienced this horrific crime, been stalked, assaulted, groomed or bullied to please reach out.”
Earlier this year, the star broke her silence about her own story of childhood sexual abuse in the hope that it might encourage others to speak out and help put abusers behind bars.
In her new hands-on role, West will help collect information about these crimes to help law enforcement, which has been the mission of Crime Stoppers around the world for decades.
It is hoped this information will provide “valuable insight into the effects of child abuse and exploitation” in order to protect the most vulnerable, she said.
“Where do the cases happen most frequently on a geographic basis? What version of those crimes happened and where,” she said.
“So that we can help guide law enforcement and other government agencies to not just facilitate ongoing investigations, but pre-empt risk.”
West, who will visit London and Lyon next year as part of her new role, said she hoped information provided to Crime Stoppers would help investigators gain better insight into how grooming works.
“Prevention is always better than cure and (it will offer) a really clear picture of what predators look like, their victims, how they groom them, where they look and how we can stop that, like identifying the risk before it actually happens,” she said.
“And the stories, the lived experience of victims is absolutely crucial in order to achieve that, because we’ve seen increasingly where there has been hearings in relation to child cases of child sex abuse, it’s the lived experience and the community impact statements which hold the most bite.”
West said her work on the News Corp Predatory podcast had encouraged victim survivors to feel comfortable to approach her from a place of shared experience and empathy.
“(The podcast) has allowed me to see patterns that plays out, understanding what the long term impact is and just see where there are these gaps, these chasms in our law enforcement capacity, in the judiciary and punishments that are handed down,” she said.
The actor said she wanted to help victims live fulfilling lives as they moved forward.
“And that’s why I have involved myself in many organisations that will agitate to change. But this one, I can really make a big change on a massive level,” she said.
If you have been the victim of sexual abuse, go to https://reports.crimestoppersinternational.org
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Originally published as Madeleine West’s new global role to help child sex abuse victims with Crime Stoppers International
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