A social enterprise providing education and information to protect and enhance the mental health of young people
The online world can be an exciting place for children. But internet-related sex crimes against children and young people are reported an average of 15 times per day in England and Wales alone. Researchers looking into how online groomers work have found that gaining victims’ trust is a key part of engaging them in sexually [...]
Barely a week goes by now without another case of rape or historic sex abuse being splashed across the news and picked over by critics. Yet misunderstanding about the nature of sexual violence leads to distorted opinions, which can further enhance victims’ feelings of shame, guilt and self-blame. Common myths about rape and sexual assault [...]
According to the FBI, sex trafficking of children in this country has become a nationwide problem. And traffickers target troubled girls with low self-esteem -- girls like Alyssa Beck. Beck was just a naïve 15 year old living in Jacksonville, Florida, when she found herself trapped in a sex trafficker's web. She would be in [...]
Twitter on Tuesday reached out to users for help crafting a ban on comments that dehumanize people and set the stage for real-world violence. A policy change that Twitter has been working on for several months is intended to broaden hateful content restrictions at the service to include barring tweets dehumanizing people based on race, [...]
A 40-year-old man from the US has been sentenced to 35 years in prison, after he groomed a 16-year-old girl from Sydney on social media to travel to New York for sex. Price was found guilty of four charges in December last year, including interstate and foreign enticement to engage in sexual activity, and attempted [...]
Almost 60 per cent of NSW voters support pill testing at music festivals despite the state government's refusal to consider it, exclusive new polling reveals one week after two people died at a dance party. The Premier, Gladys Berejiklian, last week set up an expert panel to investigate how to make music festivals safer after [...]
Recently, I was called down to the main office in the middle of my planning period. I needed to pick up an item that a parent dropped off for their child. Thinking it was something like an inhaler or money for dinner, I was happy to go retrieve it. When I got to the front [...]
In societies the world over, teenagers are blamed for staying up late, then struggling to wake up in the morning. While it’s true that plenty of teenagers (like many adults) do have bad bedtime habits, researchers have long since proven that this global problem has a biological cause. In 2004, researchers at the University of [...]
Sleep supposedly refreshes and recharges our exhausted bodies. Holidays likewise have the same effect. Why then, after a long summer holiday, are teachers and parents seeing many teenagers returning to school in an exhausted and sleep deprived state? Why, also, do they seem, paradoxically, to be most sleepy first thing in the mornings, and over [...]
When it comes to teens getting enough sleep, numerous forces are working against them. Early school start times are wreaking havoc on their circadian rhythms. An overload of after-school activities is turning bedtime into gotta-start-on-homework time. The buzz of texts from friends, the screens shining in their faces and the constant lure of just one [...]
