Adolescence: an opportunity for intervention

[Child sex] offenders often report that their sexually disordered interests or hypersexualised behaviour began in adolescence. If adolescents who are treated for harmful sexual behaviours have low recidivism rates, this suggests we could prevent a significant portion of child sexual abuse (CSA) by intervening at this age—through education, therapeutic pathways and conversations about pornography, rejection, intimacy, consent and sexual health that go beyond consent and respectful relationships education (CRRE).

Professor Michael Salter, Director of Childlight UNSW, believes adolescence is a critical time to check in with boys and that by doing so, we could reach potential offenders before they offend—but we are simply not trying. ‘We need to talk to men and boys: Are you whacking off six hours a day? What’s the material that you’re looking at? Are you concerned about that material? We just haven’t created the service infrastructure to support that group.’ If a teenage boy is frightened by his own sexual thoughts, where does he go? If he tells a psychologist he’s sexually attracted to children, what happens next? If he’s consuming increasingly extreme pornography and feels unable to stop, who can help him?

We have systems ready to step in after harm occurs, but almost none designed to intercept before it happens. We know from the 2023 Australian Child Maltreatment Study (ACMS) that a child today is more likely to be abused by an adolescent boy than by an adult, so we are negligent not to focus more intently on teenage boys, providing help to those who need it.

Shaun, fifty-five, is in the middle of a ten-year prison sentence for historical CSA—he abused his stepsons when he was in his early twenties. He was abused by his uncle at the age of eight—something he now believes may have kickstarted the hypersexual behaviour he began displaying in late primary school. As a teenager, he doesn’t recall being specifically attracted to children. ‘It was more that I was highly sexualised and I became very confused as to who I was and who I was attracted to. I experimented a lot. There were guys I used to muck around with, and then I had girlfriends as well.’

In 2016, when charged with indecent assault, his lawyer recommended he see a psychologist. He went to SafeCare – a clinic in Fremantle, which specialises in treating child sex offenders, or those worried about offending – only because it was the closest to where he lived. He’d never spoken to anyone about his life, and something clicked for him when he did. He ended up doing the treatment program twice—spending $6000—before he went to jail years later for the historical offences.

He can remember the exact moment when his self-awareness shifted. After watching The Secret – a short film that tells the story of an uncle abusing two siblings – he told the therapist how stupid it was, how dated and hokey. For two weeks, the therapist kept probing him about why he hated it so much, until he suddenly ‘absolutely fell to pieces’, because ‘this movie had got under my skin’: ‘I’d fought it without knowing I was fighting it until it finally slipped in and suddenly—there was me I was watching on the screen. I was the boy that the uncle had abused in the movie. Yep, when he was smashing plates when he was washing up. And the mum and dad don’t understand why he’s doing it, so they just tell him off and to go to his room, you know? Yep. That was me, except I did other things. But then it was me as the adult abusing the child as well. I saw it all laid out.’

I ask him if his aha moment was when he realised that his childhood victimisation had sent him on this trajectory. ‘Yeah, to a degree. But right from the start, I knew what I was doing back when I was twenty was wrong. So it wasn’t like I had an aha moment to say, “Geez, Shaun, what you did back there was wrong.” I knew it was wrong. But you didn’t know why you were doing it. I didn’t know how to put the pieces together.’ With the insight he now possesses, I ask him what he’d say to his fifteen-year-old self. ‘Get help. Get help, go get help. I would say to him, you’re not right. There’s something wrong. Get help.’

He remembers one point when intervention might have happened. At sixteen, he was ‘fooling around’ with a boy a couple of years younger. The other boy’s father found out and phoned Shaun’s father. Shaun’s father promised that he would get help for his son, but he never did.

If someone had tried to help sixteen-year-old Shaun, would he have listened? ‘If it came from the right person, he would’ve. I think he was looking for something, he needed someone, and he didn’t have direction. And he was very lost. And if someone he respected had come to him and said, “Get help,” he would’ve done it. Just to be able to talk to somebody. If somebody had spoken to me about things and got me to open up or whatever, I think it would’ve stopped. A lot of things would’ve stopped at that point. It would’ve stopped the offending, but it would also have changed the course of my education. And all sorts of things, behaviours which snowballed into other things.’

If Shaun’s father did look for help for Shaun, the support he needed may not have been available in his area in the mid-1980s. Intervention with adolescents is known, however, to be extremely effective, redirecting harmful trajectories at an age when the brain and sexual behaviours are still developing, before they get wired in and reinforced through repetition.

Jess Hill talks to me about a case she writes about in Losing It: Can We Stop Violence Against Women and Children?—an Indigenous boy, ‘Luke’, who witnessed his father almost kill his mother. Luke then witnessed a man rape his brother. Luke’s mother turned to drugs and alcohol to cope, and instead of being offered help, her four children were removed into residential care. After Luke tried to sexually assault his sister, he was isolated with two workers, where he started self-harming to extreme levels. At this point, in stepped Sheryl Batchelor, head of Yiliyapinya, an Indigenous-run not-for-profit that works intensively with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children and their carers, using techniques underpinned by theories of neuroplasticity to help these children and family members ‘rewire’ their brains and heal.

Hill tells me, ‘This boy, he’s just being left in the too hard basket, he’s on his way to youth detention. And Sheryl’s like, “No, I’m not gonna accept that,” and takes him in and is like, “We’re gonna basically rewire your brain, heal your brain. We’re gonna help you learn to self-regulate, and we’re gonna do that with your mum as well.”

And you go from having a kid who may have gone on using harmful sexual behaviours into adolescence and possibly adulthood, to a kid who’s actually supported and believed in, and has got a hope of being back with his family. That’s the key part: why are we not intervening with adolescents who are showing these harmful sexual behaviours and working with them to interrupt that cycle? Like, that’s prevention, right? That’s preventing them from going on to be the adult who’s doing that.’

New Street Services is the only free service in the country that specifically works with young people (ten to seventeen years old) who have a history of confirmed HSB. It was founded by Dale Tolliday, Senior Clinical Advisor for the Children and Young People’s Sexual Safety Unit at the Sydney Children’s Hospital Network, and is funded by NSW Health, with eleven clinics around the state. Most of the adolescents who arrive at New Street have been living in out-of-home care, and the vast majority are male. Therapy is focused on building insight and developing personal accountability, based on the belief that HSB can be addressed.

An important part of the program is including parents and caregivers in the process. Tolliday says it’s also an efficient way of getting services delivered into care situations, where family problems are often central to the young person’s behaviour. While reduced recidivism is the key measure of success for most treatments like this, Tolliday is more focused on the harm that’s already been caused and the disruptions occurring as a result. Half of the adolescents New Street works with have harmed a sibling, and Tolliday believes we underestimate the damage sibling victims incur. While New Street doesn’t deliver services to victims, it collaborates with the service that does, and helps parents navigate both children’s needs.

Those who drop out of the program carry the most risk of engaging in further harm and in being harmed themselves, and according to Tolliday, the only element that predicts whether a young person will complete the program is the positive engagement of their family. The highest drop-out rate is among those dislocated from family and in out-of-home care. Again, the family’s protective role, and the importance of early family support, comes to the fore.

I ask Tolliday about whether the current panic about the ‘manosphere’ is warranted. He agrees it’s ‘an indicator of one end of the spectrum’ but sees a broader problem. He points to the gender inequality embedded in the sector he works in, including the lack of adequate response and recovery services for teenage girls, who make up the largest cohort affected by sexual violence, and the routine blame single mothers receive. He is most concerned with exposure to pornography and other explicit material, which he sees as a huge driver of behaviour, especially for kids with less ability to discern what they’re looking at: ‘Why can that content be available where everything else has to be rated?’

These are all issues that need to be addressed, but ultimately, what we need to do most is support families. ‘All of the traumas that we see in the kids, they pre-date the sexual behaviours. Where was the response to that in terms of supporting families? For our Aboriginal kids, who are 30 to 40 per cent of the kids, early whole-of-family community support generally hasn’t been available. Their parents have struggled. Most of these parents are children of Stolen Generations, so we’re seeing a trickle-down of trauma.’

Most adolescents who exhibit harmful sexual behaviour (HSB) will not go on to offend as adults, especially if there is therapeutic intervention. However, there is a dearth of mental health services available for these teenagers around the country. In the Northern Territory, there are no treatment services available for this group. In the ACT, there’s one worker; in Queensland, it depends where you are and if you’re able to pay.

Turning Corners (now Turning Corners Community) was established by child protection organisation Bravehearts in Queensland in 2016 to fill a perceived service gap in responding to and preventing HSB by youth in the community. It relied on philanthropic funding, despite a state-funded evaluation by the University of the Sunshine Coast that found the program to be both effective and cost-efficient. The philanthropic support ended in 2024, and now it’s full-fee-for-service. Tolliday tells me there have been many attempts over the years to send Queensland adolescents down to New South Wales, to take advantage of the free service. He is regretful that New Street can’t help all who need it, but it is simply not funded to.

In one case, the Queensland Department of Child Safety proposed flying a boy from out-of-home care down for weekly appointments, but New Street refused, given that inclusion of family or carers is a key part of the program. In another case, a family wanted to send their son, who’d harmed his younger sister, down from Toowoomba, but he was not granted a place for similar reasons. Two years later, the family sent the boy to live with his grandparents in New South Wales, at which point New Street accepted him for treatment. But in that two years, ‘A lot of harm’s been done. The younger sibling had also been on a waiting list for Bravehearts [therapy] but never got to the top of the list. The family now say she doesn’t need anything because we’re not ever wanting to see him again. So it’s a totally appalling outcome.’ What would have solved the problem is the presence of a matched service on the other side of the border.

Recommendation 10.2 of the royal commission stated: ‘State and territory governments should ensure that there are adequate, accessible and appropriate therapeutic services for children with harmful sexual behaviours’, noting that the system at the time was characterised by ‘significant inconsistencies and gaps’ across Australia.

Clearly, not enough has changed. Next year will mark a decade since those recommendations were delivered—Tolliday has been keeping track in anticipation of a review. ‘I’m hoping to publish my own opinion about the degree to which the jurisdictions have implemented the recommendations,’ he says wryly. Like so many I speak with, he’s clearly frustrated, but instead of waiting for change, he’ll keep doing the work he does, helping those he’s able to help.

This is an edited extract of Before the Harm by Dr Sonia Orchard. Available from 1 September 2026 in all good bookshops.

Dr Sonia Orchard is an author, educator and survivor advocate. Her memoir “Groomed” was shortlisted for both the 2026 National Biography and Davitt Awards.