A Bold New Initiative to Empower Children in Keeping Themsleves Safe in Today's World

Kidsreach has prepared a new tool that has the potential to assist children in keeping themselves safe from physical, emotional and sexual abuse. This is a huge subject and one that the churches in NZ and Australia are only too well aware of. Often we are the ones that are left to pick up the pieces at the end of the abuse.

Kids Keep Safe aims to provide children with a new, contemporary and empowering tool designed to empower them to protect themselves against abuse. The benefits of this initiative are:

• Early intervention
• Empowerment – giving children the tools and the knowledge to act.
• It has a 'Cool' factor, making it ‘trendy’ or the ‘in thing’ to keep themselves safe. This is something present programs tend not to do.
• Kids Keep Safe is designed not to raise the anxiety level in children, nor to interfere with normal and healthy parental affection.
• With the support of the website www.kidskeepsafe.com, children will be able to practice keeping themselves safe.
  This program has been written by a clinical psychologist who specialises in children, and developed further by a professional counsellor.

A Gift Without Strings

At the inception of the Kids Keep Safe initiative, it was decided by
the Kidsreach trustees that this training would be a gift to the
children of New Zealand and should ideally be part of every child's
learning. They recognised that the best way to achieve this was to
make it a completely secular project that would have no theological or religious content.

The training is written, promoted and presented with this priority in
mind.

The trustees also decided that this secular focus would extend to the project presenters. Presenters would be selected on experience and passion and demonstrate a willingness to suspend their own belief systems (christian or otherwise) while teaching and promoting the project to ensure there will be no distraction or dilution of the messages Kids Keep Safe contains.

Priority

The priority is to get the Kids Keep Safe set of cards into the hands of every NZ and Australian child that is aged 8 years and older.

It is hoped that this can be done with the support and/or endorsement of the Ministry of Education. The opportunity is also there for service organisations and every church to be involved.

Linked to the message on the cards will be the:

• Website – child friendly - www.kidskeepsafe.com
• Class books
• Access to help lines.
• Our Request to You

This will require a huge amount of support from big sponsors and small contributors alike.

We will also need people in different areas in NZ to spearhead and promote this project.

We will keep you informed, check this page from time to time, but if you are interested in being involved in this project, please email John Brickell - john@kidskeepsafe.com.