1 May 2009
Telling stories: Child abuse, neglect and adult sexual assault
Dr Leah Bromfield, Senior Research Fellow, Australian Institute of Family Studies
Dr Antonia Quadara, Research Fellow, Australian Institute of Family Studies
Abstract, slides and audio of presentation
Edited transcript
The following audio presentation is brought to you by the Australian Institute of Family Studies as part of our monthly seminar series in which we showcase national and international research related to the family.
The seminars are designed to promote a forum for discussion and debate. They are open to the public and free of charge.
Seminar facilitated & speaker introduced by Dr Daryl Higgins.
Antonia Quadara:
Just to give you a bit of background as to why we've actually got this set up happening. Leah and I put together a presentation not long ago on the prevalence characteristics and system responses to child abuse and neglect and to adult sexual assault. And we're sitting there looking at the computer thinking how are we going to bring together our respective areas and we realised that in order to do that with any degree of coherence, we first have to start telling each other some of the key stories that are happening in our sectors and areas.
Leah Bromfield:
So there's a number of many smaller stories that we need to explain to each other. In the process of telling those stories, we've reflected on what we were learning from the other sector.
Yeah, and what we found was the presentation that we were originally pulling together was around looking for areas of commonality and certainly there was a lot of commonality and a lot of things we shared and could work better together on. But what, I guess, was really enlightening was when we reflected on the areas of divergence and found when we unpacked some of that we could enrich the understandings of our own sectors.
Antonia: That's right. So today's really a kind of behind the scenes reflection, if you like, on that process. To share with you the stories that we needed to tell each other in order to make [noise] of each other's sectors. What we're hoping for a little bit later on is to open up that discussion and hear from everyone else in the audience about your thoughts on those stories and your practice, expertise and knowledge in these areas to help us because we're really just beginning the process.
I think trying to work out where there's overlap and where there's a divergence.
Leah: Yeah, and I guess the title of the seminar as well, is deliberately evocative and, I guess, tapping into some of those complexities and multiple meanings within the sector which we have talked about telling stories because, literally, we've had to tell each other stories about our sector. But the notion of telling stories also taps into the ideas of victims who tell their stories through disclosure. But I guess some of the more unhelpful perceptions and attitudes around victims can also be tapped into here with the idea of telling stories or making up stories and disclosures and ideas in the Australian culture around it being bad to dob and that actually preventing people from telling their stories.
So we've sort of tried to acknowledge even in our title the complexities and multiple meanings within the two sectors.
Antonia: So in terms of why we're having this kind of critical reflection, it's to suggest that not only is talking to each other really important to share and develop our abilities to critically reflect but also that by folding and feeding those learning's back into each of our sectors we actually enrich service responses that it actually has a kind of practical outcome and that's where we'd like to end the discussion today. Sort of suggesting, well so what we've had a nice discussion but what might this actually mean.
Leah: We did want to recognise that these are just that it's been necessary to pull together some fairly broad generalisations in order to identify the commonality. And that there is a lot underneath that and in parts we have tried to unpack some of those generalisations but for economy and because we've only got an hour, there's some parts we are having to keep to broad brush strokes. We do recognise that there is a lot of complexity that underpins that.
We also, I guess, talk more about issues and challenges to do with siloing within policy and our legislative systems and I wanted to recognise that, I think we do a lot better job in practice about recognising where things are actually joined up and the services that are out there. Many services out there that are already seeing the clients across the two sectors. So just to recognise when we talk about the need to recognise commonalities, that a lot of that work has already been done at a practice level. But we need to make sure systemically that we're doing that as well.
Antonia: I guess I'd like to just acknowledge the fact that this is actually an opportunity presented to Leah and I by the director of the institute, Alan Hayes and also to Sue Tate, the deputy director, for giving us the space to further and develop this initial discussion that Leah and I had had. Also to thank Daryl Higgins, general manager and chair, for facilitating the discussion later on. Ren Adams and to the IT and web team. So there's a whole bunch of people behind getting us up here.
Leah: That's right. Alright, well I might actually start the presentation. We've got five stories that we're going to talk to today and try to break it up in that way. The first one is really around this public symbolic economies of victimisation and the fact that our domain are marked by polarised representations of victims of child abuse and neglect compared to victims of adult sexual assault.
I've got a few headlines up here for the child abuse and neglect sector over the last few years. It really taps into this idea of victims of child abuse and neglect and particularly a fatal abuse being conceived as the innocence whom we've failed. It's fairly equally ways as to who failed these children, whether it is - who's accountable. Whether it is the person who was responsible for their death or the systems who we've set up to protect them.
I guess within this, the headlines, you see this idea that, yes child rearing is a private matter but only to an extent. There is a point when we start to accept that the public is going to intervene to protect children. That there's a social expectation around, it's okay to intervene in the private sphere in relation to children because of their innocence and need for protection.
Do you want to talk a bit about ...
Antonia: I'm not sure that with the public representation and public discussions around sexual assault that there's actually a sphere, I guess, symbolic economy around sexual assault. I think there's a lot of confusion about the deservedness of victims of violence. Whether they deserve recognition, whether they deserve what happened to them, for example. It kind of depends on the context in which, or the circumstances in which the sexual assaults actually take place.
I did a very scientific quick perusal of recent headlines. What seems clear is that there's a kind of stereotype of the predatory rapist and they're usually given a moniker like, the hot chocolate rapist, granny rapist, vicious rapist. They are faceless and the experience of sexual assault is random. There's no real rationale or reason as to why it happens. So that's one kind of way of talking about it.
The other is, particularly when we're talking about school's my word, oh it's not quite as good as Leah's, apologies. Particularly around sexual assaults in the schools or sexual abuse in schools it gets renamed as a sex scandal. Instead of being about violence and a random attack, it's about school girl sex and the way in which the actual text, particularly in media might represent that is that the actions are not described as assaults but they're described as the perpetrator kissed the victim survivor. So there's a real confusion in how to describe the circumstances and incidents of sexual assault.
What I think doesn't get talked about are the everyday realities in which in everyday circumstances in which some experience sexual assault. I have here just a couple of - just these bottom two here, one's from a county court case where the issue of gravity and severity of the assault is understood to be worse when it's a stranger who's sexually assaulted the survivor. Similarly, so we have an issue around severity and we've also got an issue around whether sexual assault is about sex and men's inability to control their sexual appetites. And that these kinds of confusions really impact on how we position victim survivors which I think is quite different from the innocence of children in the child protection system.
Leah: And it seems to have a difference in relation to whether we intervene or not. So that innocence and vulnerability of children means that we have, not just a right but a responsibility to intervene and that seems to be an accepted social standard. We don't get the same ...
Antonia: No it's regarded as a kind of more ambiguous, he said, she said, we're not quite sure what really happened and we'll have to wait until the outcome of a criminal case to make a determination as to what happened and I would argue that's quite a problematic position to take because it inhibits us from actually making statements about each personal sector of violence between individuals and to say, look this is a problem and we need to say something about it.
So in terms of where we started to overlap, so we had the sort of conversation and said, yep, we're dealing with some different symbolic economies but when we actually look more closely at patterns of victimisations, at what some of the larger scale surveys are telling us, we actually see that there are lots of similarities. So to those of us that work both within the sexual assault sector and those of us that are working within child protection and child sexual abuse, we kind of dismiss the symbolic economy as inaccurate and say, yep, we know better.
What we're going to talk about this second story is where we overlapped in terms of characteristics that were relevant to making or rendering victims more vulnerable to victimisation.
Leah: When we looked at gender, initially, you can say there's a very simple story here about shared vulnerability around gender, so particularly for child sexual abuse and adult sexual assault of women and girls predominantly more likely to experience those forms of maltreatment and violence. But there's also, I guess, a broader story which is that there is a gender based vulnerability. Is there anything else?
Antonia: Only to say that when we're talking about the gender based vulnerability with victims of sexual assault, I just want to flag that, yes, that is - that we can say across the population broadly, one in five women reports experience of a sexual violence if we include other forms of sexual threat. But it's difficult to get an estimation as to what's happening with male victims of sexual assault. The personal safety survey gives us a bit of an indication but I think we need to factor into that some very different barriers to disclosure. It's just important to say that this isn't - it's important to not set up a situation of saying, women are the more likely victims and therefore the ones that we should only be paying attention to. It's also important to find ways of obtaining more information about male survivors.
Leah: Which holds across child sexual abuse as well.
Antonia: That's right.
Leah: In relation to age, there's some fairly different processes going on. What's shared is the idea that age does contribute to vulnerability but for child abuse and neglect, for example, you're going to have different vulnerabilities at different ages and stages. So infants and young children are much more vulnerable to neglect because they rely so much more on their carers for their daily survival. Whereas older children are more vulnerable to sexual abuse, particularly as they start increasing their spheres of networks.
Antonia: And socialisation. Certainly there's an argument that's put that sexual assault is very much about younger women between the ages of, depending on the data that you're looking at, 18 and 24. You're looking at them and they constitute the largest proportion of survivors of sexual assault. Having said that, I think it's also important to acknowledge that we actually know very little about the sexual violence against women post 60. Lots of surveys don't collect data about that. If researchers or GPs or other health services are, in fact, collecting that information, it becomes recoded as an issue of age rather than gender. So it's about frailty and elder abuse so we actually start to lose the connection. But if we take age and gender together, I think there's something to suggest that women are experiencing more sustained or steady levels of sexual violence and domestic violence over the life course.
So I'm just thinking about the personal safety survey which showed that for men, after a certain age, the experience of violence dropped quite dramatically. I think it was after about 35. Whereas for women, what we saw were, yes, it decreased but it decreased more slowly and in smaller increments, I suppose, over different age gaps. I just wanted to flag that there's a life span approach, I guess, that needs to be considered here as well ...
Leah: Gender and age are not really contextual factors, you can't change them, they are innate, they're independent variables in research ter ms. But there are some shared circumstances and environments and experiences that increase both women's and children's or victims of sexual assault and victims of child abuse and neglect, their vulnerabilities to violence.
Antonia: Now Leah, I know that you had said that domestic violence is very apparent in child protection populations?
Leah: Yeah, one of the top three presenting problems within families who come to child protection services.
Antonia: Right. And when I was discussing that with you, my thought was, well how is sexual assault figuring within that. Sexual assaults are a particularly hidden dimension of domestic violence. It's not something that's disclosed and it's not something that's really screened for as far as I can tell. And I certainly don't mean that across Australia no one is asking these questions but in terms of our preliminary health services and GPs, there's a bit of a reluctance to actually be asking questions around the experience of sexual violence within intimate partnerships.
I think that that hidden dimension is through also at the level of public discourse. So we do talk a lot about domestic violence and the impact on children and when we talk about violence against women as well, I think the default position is that we're talking about domestic violence and not sexual assault.
Leah: Another sort of shared context is the idea of both mental health and substance misuse and both of these problems can make people more vulnerable to experiencing child abuse and neglect and sexual assault. In saying that, we're not in any way saying that the victim is at all responsible. But if you take children as an example, a child with mental health problems or behavioural problems is more vulnerable to maltreatment. Part of that is the additional stresses for caring for a child like that. But that's within a context of other issues interrelating to increase that vulnerability.
Antonia: Yeah, and I would reiterate that particularly when we're talking about adult sexual assaults, the issue of substance misuse is I think really loaded because it can be used to suggest that the victim survivor is somehow to blame. Or when we're thinking about the criminal justice process does not make a reliable witness. So just want to flag the way the issue operates quite differently within the sexual assault sector.
But just to kind of look more closely at, for example, alcohol consumption. What we do know is that alcohol consumption is extremely common for both perpetrators of sexual assault and also survivors of sexual assault, i.e. it is an element within socialising and networking and can be used to increase survivor's - well, potential victims' vulnerability to sexual violence. Perpetrators might use it in different ways. They might use it to - just thinking of some recent research that's been done and I can talk about that later on. Where perpetrators may use alcohol either to increase the vulnerability of a potential victim. So very, very predatory or in a kind of more, arguably, subconscious way. Use it to diminish their own responsibility. I didn't know what I was doing because I was actually quite inebriated. It inhibits or it produces a tendency to not listen to any inbuilt impulse control, I guess.
Leah: I guess when we were continuing these conversations about shared vulnerability, what we found was that there was a particular overlap around the issue of multiple victimisation and life course vulnerability. Disability was one of those things that came up significantly across the two sectors with disability increasing a child or an adult's susceptibility to child abuse and neglect and to adult sexual assault.
Antonia: That's right. The research suggests that women in particular with intellectual disability or a psychiatric disability that these are the factors that are most strongly related to sexual assault. So there's a question there also about what is the thinking from a perpetrator's point of view in targeting these particular individuals.
Leah: I think we need to, I'm conscious of time, we'd like to speed through some of these things. State and institutional care was also a shared vulnerability for children and for adults and I think the statistics there were particularly shocking for adults in institutional care.
Antonia: I think so and I think that in a sense the rates of both child sexual assault and adult sexual assault with women in correctional facilities actually is the end point or is really the thing that tells us that our sectors need to talk. Because I think that what happens when these issues aren't addressed and systems aren't working together results in that the high proportions of early victimisation are seen in the correctional [unclear] sector.
Leah: I think the other thing that we did want to talk about was the idea of child abuse and neglect or past victimisation, also creating then a higher life time vulnerability to further victimisation. So for the child abuse and neglect sector, the example is the child who has been neglected as a young child is so much more vulnerable to then extra familial perpetrators of child sexual abuse. They are children who are often starved for attention. There's not a lot of supervision there and they're more susceptible for grooming. So the past experience of abuse or neglect can make them more vulnerable to future experiences. I guess, make them a more likely or desirable victim for those predatory perpetrators.
Antonia: Certainly we know that experiences of child sexual abuse are very strongly correlated with further experiences of adult sexual victimisation. That's not to suggest that it's totally deterministic, it's to suggest that for particular populations the interaction between the impacts of victimisation and system responses can exacerbate further victimisation.
Leah: We talked a lot about where we have crossed over but what we found was the key area of differentiation was actually this idea of concentrated disadvantage. So area and socio economic disadvantage. For child protection, this is really important. We know that there's a concentration of families with the greatest level of poverty in neighbourhoods, so we get area based disadvantage. Recent studies have showed that neighbourhoods can actually contribute to children's outcomes and it really points to the need for primary prevention and secondary prevention targeting disadvantaged neighbourhoods.
The same can be said for a disadvantage concentrated in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities. Where we have a community that is very disadvantaged and there's a need then to look at what strategies can be put in place there. The communities for children initiative under the stronger families and communities strategy being an example of that type of intervention.
Antonia: When we were having this conversation, my head shook a lot because I really wondered whether these were useful constructs for thinking about particularly women's experiences of sexual violence when we take sexual violence a little bit more broadly and include within that experiences of sexual harassment, stalking, unwanted - what young people in particular call as being unwanted or for worse, sex. When you take all of those together does it still make sense to use area based disadvantage and socio economic status as constructs. I had to think about why I had this head shaking moment.
I think it's largely because both area based disadvantage and socio economic status offer structural explanations for victimisation and to me this kind of takes us away a little bit from talking about gender as a structural reason or gender politics or ideas about sexual difference as being a structural reason for why sexual assault is so prevalent in Australia.
I guess that kind of sexual assault socio political dimension and I was wondering, well how does area based and socio economic status come into play. Does it undermine those sorts of analyses of sexual violence?
Leah: I guess I took on what Antonia was saying and thought well are we losing anything by focussing on this and I guess child abuse and neglect does cross all socio economic spheres. We know this and it's an accepted discourse and it holds within our sector. But then when we look at what we actually do, we know that those who have the greatest disadvantage will come into contact with more services. There's more surveillance, we're more likely to detect abuse and neglect in those families. We then look at our responses and I think that we do set our priorities from those families who are most likely to come into contact with child protection services.
I guess I started to reflect. Are we missing the needs of some of those children from middle and upper socio economic backgrounds through our focus on, what do we need to address child protection problems?
Antonia: [unrelated topic]
Leah: I think we'll talk about the divergence and I think - so story three is about trauma and we can say without much discussion that we really did share our understanding of how trauma impacts.
Antonia: Particularly over the long-term.
Leah: We have thought that that would be the only story here. We were really surprised when we started talking this out. That we actually did have an area of divergence and it was a really interesting one because there was lessons to be learned from each sector.
Antonia: That's right. In terms of sexual assaults, just in reflecting around trauma. It seems that there's maybe a lack of shared understanding about the impacts, like the trauma impacts of sexual assault, particularly when we're looking at how that plays out within different sectors. So that the sexual assault counselling and sexual assault specialist sectors very much work within a trauma and recovery model. But I'm aware that there are tensions and we talked about post-traumatic stress disorder and the medicalisation of trauma and recovery within a more psychological or medical domain. There can be a bit of a clash of, what are we actually talking about here.
Particularly, I just want to flag that with the recover and trauma model, the discourse that really emphasises the empowerment of the victim survivor. That they are empowered to make decisions, the idea is that sexual assault has taken control away and the most important thing to be doing is to give a sense of control back to victim survivors. So choice, agency, privacy versus the treating of the impacts of trauma, I think, are two quite separate models.
But it did leave me wondering whether in fact there's a very big burden that we're placing on victim survivors, with the burden of choice, of having to be the one to initially disclose and making choices throughout, accessing services. So whether there was anything that we could be learning from the child protection sector in your kind of conceptualisation of trauma and what that might mean, that we could take away.
Leah: When we looked at how we use trauma in the child protection sector and I am very specifically talking child protection here, not therapeutic treatment services for victim survivors. We tend to talk about trauma, attachment and development and we really recognise the impacts of trauma. We can then, in the way it's been used though, we tend to think about it as trauma as a sign of abuse or neglect and our real push is to try and avoid children experiencing that trauma.
We then look at our responses, they tend to be more around prevention or detection in order to be able to avoid or stop the abuse or neglect rather than on that empowerment, choice and recovery which seems to be running through the sexual assault field. When we thought about it, we actually thought, wow we said initially that we just rejected symbolic conceptualisations of victim hood. But when we thought about why we had these different conceptualisations, they really seem to stem from that social driver around a community expectation that we prevent and stop child abuse and neglect because children are the innocent and need to be protected. Whether there was some of that symbolism running through to then the structure of our systems.
Antonia: That's right. I think that that works also for adult sexual assault in the symbolic framing means that the counsellor advocate workers are very much aware of the buffering or countering the more public or social reactions to sexual assault. There's very much an emphasis on trauma recovery and resilience. So we have that dual identity of the victim survivor.
Leah: We were very worried when we did this because every time we talk about this we come up with new things. And we thought how are we going to contain the time. We'll move onto story number four because we're not doing all that well at containing. This one for me was, I think, the most valuable and enriching discussion.
Antonia: Yeah, I think so. We really started off with this idea that we had absolutely nothing in common here really. I asked Leah, who is actually involved in the child protection system, who are the clients and what is their relationship to the child. It wasn't something I knew very much about at all.
Leah: And so for child protection we're talking about the perpetrator's of abuse and neglect being predominantly parents but really when we look at child protection clients, we start to see that it's really predominantly mothers. I guess this is a story that we really hadn't recognised initially. When we start to look at the profile of parents who are involved in child protection services, we see gender , it's mostly mothers. Age is a factor, so young mums being at greater risk. We see very high rates of domestic violence, mental illness, substance misuse, disability, past abuse and neglect or victimisation, lower educational attainment, income dependence and unstable housing, in the parents who present to child protection services.
These are the same characteristics that we've identified in victim survivors of child abuse and neglect and adult sexual assault. In child protection, mothers do tend to be held responsible for most abuse and neglect. Now that's partly around social constructions, so socially we say, mothers have got the primary role of parenting th en o missions of care - so neglect - where there's been a failure to provide adequate care is the responsibility of the mother. We see that working most poorly in cases of domestic violence where mothers are held accountable for failing to protect. There is a shift and we're trying to move on from that.
There's also the reality that mothers are the primary carers for children. They spend more time with children and so necessarily they have more opportunity to abuse or neglect their children. We started to see this crossover around, we've got these parents who are involved with child protection as a crossover with survivors.
Antonia: That's right. We clearly understood that there would be a crossover in terms of perpetrators when we were talking about child sexual abuse and adult sexual assault. Gender would be similar and also the types of relationships that perpetrators had to their victims would be similar. We put that discussion to one side and talked at length about all the issues that Leah had just raised. This was the visual representation, if you like, of that discussion and of saying, well in terms of the blue triangle there which represents the client within the child protection sector, that these could potentially be, and may very likely be, the overlapping experiences of child sexual violence, sorry, child sexual abuse and sexual violence and domestic violence.
In fact, there are - what we see, there might be three sectors here that are overlapping in both the shared histories of those that are coming to like an individual system or a sector. Also, in terms of the sorts of services that they might need to be accessing.
Leah: What sort of stood out for me when we first had this conversation is, we've got an overlap here in, it's not in relation to who are the perpetrators but that adult survivors and the mothers who come to child protection or the parents who come to child protection, that's the overlap. And Antonia sort of went, wow, I don't think of women ....
Antonia: ... as perpetrators. That that was a very difficult thing to get around and so Leah explained that that wasn't the model that they were actually working with.
Leah: Yeah, so I guess in child protection, we talk about perpetrators of child sexual abuse but we don't like to talk about parents as perpetrators. The intent matters in child protection, most parents don't set out to abuse and neglect their children. They're parents who are struggling because of their own backgrounds of victimisation and disadvantage to care, so they're parents with problems. What our model is, is really about supporting parents so they can care adequately for their children. That is actually something, that's a conversation we really need to have with the sexual assault sector about how then sexual assault services who are seeing women, who are also parents, can be having a conversation ...
Antonia: Interact in a way that actually supports parenting and feeding back then into the what's needed for this client of the child protection. Or, more importantly, can actually act as a way of venting women from arriving within the child protection system in the first place. Sexual assault services have the expertise of acknowledging and knowing what the impacts of child sexual abuse are and child sexual abuse is so not disclosed. I know that's grammatically incorrect.
When we talk about child abuse and neglect, we have notifications that child sexual abuse people do not disclose for quite a long, long time. It's not until they are adults, often, that they will go and seek services. What does that mean then? Or they might not actually seek services until their own children are experiencing child sexual abuse. What might that mean then for their engagement in terms of adult sexual assault services? What can they bring to the child protection sector?
Leah: Parenting itself may be a trigger for these experiences to present themselves and so parents who are survivors of sexual abuse, sexual assault may be in particular need. I guess one of the driving forces within child protection at the moment is to work better with adult treatment services to help them to see how they can recognise their clients as parents and support them to prevent their entry into child protection. This isn't about blaming victims, it's about supporting them in their parenting.
Antonia: Leah, are you happy if we move to systems?
Leah: Yep.
Antonia: This was also a flag for us as extremely different and I think we might just try and summarise fairly quickly about how they were quite different.
Leah: When we're talking about it, Antonia, is saying we don't get enough people in and I'm saying well we've got exactly the same as the opposite problem. We've got a child protection system that is much bigger than we want it to be. In some way our discourse is around child protection being everyone's responsibility has been too successful because everyone now rings us and makes a report to child protection. So we are aiming for a public health model with primary prevention, secondary prevention services and then child protection as tertiary prevention being the smallest part of our service sector. The reality, when we look across Australia, is that we have a much bigger child protection and out of home care sector than we have secondary services. We don't have the capacity in secondary services to deal with the prevention needs.
We also have, as Daryl said earlier, one in five notifications are substantiated. That's four in five notifications of families who someone's been concerned enough about to make a report. These families could likely benefit from family support services but they have to go through the child protection door, four out of five may get referral. Many of them don't get any services at all. So our big challenge is actually inverting the pyramid to get a public health model of child protection, in reality not just in rhetoric.
Antonia: Thanks, Leah. Ours, I guess I should say, is I don't think that the sexual assault sector, if you can call it a sector, actually has a central system. So there's a child protection system but sexual assault actually has a number of different players all involved with responding to sexual assault. There are sexual assault services, there's the health services, there's the criminal justice system and currently I think the criminal justice system is functioning as a default system, a centralised system.
So currently the key model is the efficient triangle, the idea that incidents of sexual assaults are increasingly filtered out of the criminal justice system. There's some significant questions about what happens at each stage of that filtering out process. If this is the current model that we're really using to describe the responses to sexual assault, what happens at the exit point? What happens when, for example, police have decided that this is a no further police action matter? Do they have a responsibility to actually and do they have the wherewithal, do they have the language to say, our responsibility here is to actually refer this person onto a support service or onto some alternative way of making sense, both of what happened but also the fact that no further police action has resulted? I don't know that that's something that people have been talking about.
To summarise, the systems are quite different. Leah is saying they want to minimise who's getting into that coercive end. Whereas the challenge has always - the sexual assault sector - has always been to get into the coercive end, if you like. To get to that pointy end of the criminal justice system.
In terms of our agendas for change, look quite different, but how, as we talked more, we realised that there were in fact some way, like one particular action that would help us with, invert our triangles, our respective triangles, if you like.
Leah: Yeah, what we've realised is while we had different needs, what we shared was a similar agenda to achieve those needs. At least at one part and that was around primary prevention and creating healthy communities. I think that given we've got the one minute mark, we might now open it up to people to comment.
Antonia: That's right. I'll just leave it there. I'll just leave it there with our discussion around primary prevention, around different systems, different challenges and changed agendas but primary prevention as a shared solution. Whether that was something that we may not be harnessing as well as we could, for instance.
Leah: And whether we could work together across the sectors towards some of those goals.
Antonia: That's right.
Facilitator: Thanks Leah and Antonia.
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