ABSTRACT While institutions, including schools, have responsibilities to protect children from harm, responses to instances of child sexual abuse have often exhibited avoidance and denial. Recent public inquiries in Australia revealed that some institutions, particularly in the Catholic sector, employed a deliberate strategy of silence which was used to conceal abuse to protect their public image. In response, these inquiries called for silence to be replaced with child‐safe cultures that are more open, accountable, committed to ongoing learning and capable of engaging in conversations about child abuse and its prevention. This article offers reflections on how Victorian schools are enabled to respond to this vision based on our experiences securing approvals to conduct research with principals on child safety and non‐recent harm acknowledgement. We focus on the Government and Catholic sectors, both of which operate under similar oversight frameworks, and the challenges we faced from some Catholic sector bodies in particular. While we recognise that educational governance bodies and principals can decline to participate in research for a variety of reasons, we suggest that our experiences can be read as a reflection of the continuing silence in some school sectors that is out of step with expectations regarding contemporary child‐safe cultures.
Crowley et al. (Wed,) studied this question.