Background
The Courage Club was the result of Open Doors: Protecting Our Kids From Harm, a project funded by Accident Compensation Corporation (ACC).
Help Auckland is here to support Aucklanders who have been sexually abused. We help to heal victims and survivors through crisis support, counselling and helpline services, enabling them to reclaim their rights to live good lives. We help to educate; teaching the Auckland community about sexual abuse, raising awareness and reducing stigma, so we can all support those who have been hurt. We work with families, preschool centres and communities; teaching them how to protect those most likely to be targeted, children.
Find out more
Help Auckland
RPE works in the greater Auckland area and nationally to prevent sexual violence through the delivery of education and health promotion and prevention activities. Our team supports the rights of every person to respectful and positive sexual experiences, no matter what sexual orientation, gender identity or gender expression. We provide multiple programs around Auckland to promote this message and to educate and prevent sexual violence in our community.
Find out more
Rape prevention education
Curative is a creative agency inspiring positive social change. We’re always chasing ideas and messages that both resonate and inspire. We’re looking to cut through assumptions and challenge norms. And we seek to amplify and celebrate community voices and experiences. Our processes value and privilege lived experience, actively share power and enable authentic participation. Our spaces, creative processes and ways of working are designed to be inclusive of and accessible to everyone.
Find out more
CurativeAbout the courage club
Funded by ACC in response to Te Aorerekura - The National Strategy to Eliminate Family Violence and Sexual Violence, Open Doors is a partnership between
Curative,
Help Aucklandand
Rape Prevention EducationOur collaboration specifically focuses on the needs of whānau living with disability because evidence suggests there is an increased risk of abuse for young people with disabilities.
During earlier phases of Open Doors we sought to understand what resources and knowledge existed to support parents and whānau of children with disabilities in relation to the prevention of child sexual harm. We found a lot of inconsistency.
To best understand how we can provide better support or resources for parents with children with disabilities, we spoke with parents and whānau, experts and community leaders. These people all had experience in sexual violence response & prevention, or in disability advocacy or service provision.
We also spoke to a group of young disabled adults, to reflect on what would have helped their parents and whānau to support them when they were younger. What we heard was that many parents find it really difficult to talk about sex, sexuality, sexual harm, and sexual safety. Especially with their disabled kids.
They can find support for disabled children specific to this topic:
- Overwhelming and inaccessible
- A constant battle and lonely
- Hard and problematic
- Contrary to existing norms about ableism, racism and rights for sexual wellbeing
- Too big of an issue to overcome.
They told us they needed a community to have generative kōrero, to feel seen and understood and for resources to be realistic and easy to access.
So to meet some of those needs, we believe we can foster a culture of connection and brave conversations between parents about both disability and sexual safety.
Join us at The Courage Club
Listen Now
The Courage Club was bought to you by the courageous teams at HELP Auckland and Rape Prevention Education.