Simon Hackett, Lynne Cairns, Janelle Rabe, Kjersti Draugedalen
Rights-based practice with children/YP displaying HSB
Workshop Abstract
Despite the centrality of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) in shaping modern child welfare policy, children’s rights perspectives remain largely absent from research, policy, and practice concerning children and young people who display harmful sexual behaviour (HSB).
Dominant criminological and risk-oriented frameworks have historically positioned such children outside the moral and conceptual boundaries of childhood, obscuring their developmental status, needs, and rights.
This symposium brings together recent conceptual and empirical work from the UK and Norway that seeks to challenge this omission and to articulate what rights-based practice means in the context of HSB—conceptually, relationally, and operationally.
Professor Simon Hackett (Durham University, UK) will open the session by introducing a new framework that applies UNCRC principles to practice with children who display HSB. His presentation will explore how grounding assessment, intervention, and policy in children’s rights offers a more coherent ethical foundation for the field.
He will argue that viewing HSB through a rights-based and developmental lens enables responses that are proportionate, accountable, and restorative.
Dr Janelle Rabe and Dr Lynne Cairns (Durham University, UK) will present research that interrogates how criminological and risk-oriented paradigms have historically marginalised children who display HSB, displacing them from the conceptual category of “child.” Drawing on insights from childhood studies, their presentation explores how a developmental and rights-based reframing repositions these children as active social participants, opening space for more humane, participatory, and contextually grounded practice.
Dr Kjersti Draugedalen (Education Specialist, Tønsberg Municipality, Norway) will close with insights from her applied work in schools, exploring how teachers and education professionals can act as human rights defenders and navigate ethical dilemmas in responding to sexual behaviour.
Together, the symposium challenges the field to re-centre rights, development, and dignity in responses to HSB. The session will conclude with an open discussion, inviting participants to reflect on their own practice contexts and consider how rights-based and developmental principles can be applied in everyday work with children and young people.
About the Speakers
Simon Hackett is Professor of Child Abuse and Neglect in the Centre for Research into Violence and Abuse at Durham University, UK. With over three decades of experience in the field, Simon has conducted extensive research and authored a wide range of publications on harmful sexual behaviors in childhood.
He is the primary author of the NSPCC’s operational framework for responding to children exhibiting harmful sexual behaviors and a co-author of the widely used AIM3 assessment model. Reports on this subject include expert reviews for the UK’s Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse and a 2024 evidence review that has informed the Council of Europe’s Committee of Experts on Violence against Children.
Additionally, Simon contributed significantly to the 2016 UK National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) Guidelines on Harmful Sexual Behaviour, representing the UK’s inaugural public health guidance on sexual abuse by children and young people. He is also widely known for his continuum model of sexual behaviour in childhood. Simon actively participates in various professional associations dedicated to preventing and responding to child sexual abuse.
He is incoming President of ATSA and past Chair of NOTA. In the UK, he is a member of the Advisory Board of the Centre of Expertise on Child Sexual Abuse.
Dr Lynne Cairns is a Research Associate with the Contextual Safeguarding team at Durham University. Her doctoral research explored the everyday lives of boys aged 13–18 who have displayed harmful sexual behaviour, focusing on the social and spatial dynamics of safety, risk, and rights.
Using creative and participatory methods—including virtual reality and visual storytelling — her work highlights how young people’s lived environments shape both vulnerability and resilience. Lynne’s research contributes to reimagining HSB responses that prioritise children’s rights, relational safety, and contextual approaches to prevention and intervention.
Dr Janelle Rabe is a Research Associate in the Centre for Research into Violence and Abuse (CRiVA) at Durham University. Her doctoral research, Step Up, Speak Out, used participatory and creative methods to co-produce knowledge with young people about sexual violence and prevention.
Centring young people’s voices, her work explored how participation itself can act as protection, fostering justice, validation, and care in educational and community contexts. Janelle’s research informs rights-based, collaborative approaches to prevention, policy, and practice, and contributes to the development of the UNCRC-grounded framework for responses to harmful sexual behaviour.
Dr Kjersti Draugedalen is an Education Specialist in Tønsberg Municipality, Norway, and project leader for the Norwegian Research Council–funded innovation project Improving Safeguarding for Children and Young People (2024–2028).
A qualified teacher, she completed her PhD in 2023 on teachers’ capacities to detect and intervene in harmful sexual behaviour. Her current research develops and evaluates interdisciplinary training to strengthen educators’ safeguarding roles through rights-based, transformative approaches to Relationship and Sexuality Education.
Kjersti’s work bridges research, policy, and practice to advance primary prevention and child-centred safeguarding in schools