Many years have passed since I was that five, ten, and 15-year-old child sitting in a classroom dreading the sound of the day’s final school bell, indicating it was time to go home. I disliked weekends and feared Christmas, Easter, and summer holidays. School was my “safe haven” and the only place I felt safe.

The statistics of child abuse in Newfoundland and Labrador are staggering and frankly, should be unacceptable. We know the numbers are directly related to the province’s high rates of mental and physical illness, violence, homelessness, post-traumatic stress disorder, substance abuse, and addictions.

In 2018, I contacted the Canadian Centre for Child Protection to talk about Kids in the Know. Kids in the Know is a national, interactive, safety education program which uses age-appropriate lessons to increase children’s personal safety skills in order to reduce their risk of victimization online and offline. I was told that representatives from Newfoundland and Labrador had already expressed interest in the program.

Later that year, I reached out to the police chief and suggested we work together to create protection for school-age children in our province. During the meeting, I talked about school being my “safe haven” and the chief expressed concern when chatting about his experience with child victims of domestic abuse.

We quickly developed a team that included several members of the police force and two pediatricians from Eastern Health. Our primary goal was to advocate for a safety program and the Kids in the Know program certainly “checked all the boxes”. Among other things, it focuses on child abuse, sexual exploitation, cyberbullying, internet safety, and the overall wellness of children.

We did not expect the program to be adopted overnight but with all other provinces and territories successfully using the program and our closest neighbours – Nova Scotia and New Brunswick – having province-wide implementations since 2009 and 2014, we assumed it was only a matter of time. Unfortunately, that was not the case.

For me, the abuse continued well into my teen years. What happened inside my house was my norm, and if I didn’t know it was wrong, how could I stop it? I truly believe children who are educated in body safety – knowing when something is wrong as well
as how to safely report it – have an exponentially greater chance of stopping abuse, or preventing it from happening in the first place.

In the past five years, my team and I have juggled our schedules to meet with numerous groups, organizations, politicians, and government officials. We presented our case for the program and left every meeting feeling validated, supported, and optimistic.

In the time we have spent advocating, thousands of vulnerable children have continued to be abused, exploited, and victimized, and it happens EVERY SINGLE DAY in this province. Yet, we are still not providing the most basic preventative tool to our children – EDUCATION!

Our children are the future and educating them in safety skills, as in all other provinces and territories, must be a top priority.

It is time for action!
Bev