Your Expert School Abuse Lawyers

Schools are highly valued in Australian society and have a broader role than educating children. The Australian Government has various domestic responsibilities to uphold children’s rights to education, to provide a safe learning environment and to protect children against abuse in schools. If you or your child have experienced abuse within a school, our experienced abuse lawyers can provide assistance.

School abuse can take many forms, from physical abuse to sexual abuse, bullying, neglect, and other forms of emotional abuse in schools. Sometimes it can involve teachers, while, at other times it only involves students. As in other contexts, abusers in school settings use a wide range of tactics and strategies, including grooming, to facilitate the abuse of a child. Abuses can groom the child, as well as other people in the child’s life, for example their parents or carers, teachers, and other staff members within the school community. The rise of more advanced technology and the prevalence of different social media platforms over the years has made online bullying difficult to track and more prevalent, both on school grounds and outside of the school. While many schools have adopted anti-bullying policies and programs, bullying and abuse still occurs in many different forms.

The Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sex Abuse identified numerous problems in the ways that schools responded to child sexual abuse in school and met their responsibility to keep children safe. Many of these problems are common to other types of institutions, however certain features and risks of the school environment have influenced how these failures manifest in schools and magnify the impact of failed responses. Following the inquiry, recommendations were made to improve child protection in schools.

Despite these efforts, school abuse in all forms still occurs and can have damaging long-term mental health impacts on students, impacting not only their academic performance at school, but also their future prospects, ability to earns table income, and self-esteemSchool abuse lawyers can help past and current students and their families to stop abuse in its tracks, bring justice to the survivor, hold the school institution responsible, while protecting the safety and identity of the survivor.