The frontline of healing

When someone asks you what you do, how do you explain it?

I trained as a social worker over 30 years ago, and I'm currently the Director of the South Eastern Centre Against Sexual Assault (SECASA).

We have 11 centres spread across the southeastern corridor from Windsor to McCrae, Hastings, Pakenham, Cranbourne, Berwick, and then back into Dandenong, East Bentleigh and Seaford. We're the largest sexual assault and family violence service in Victoria, both geographically and in terms of staffing profile.

Our team of 90 staff is made up of a great admin team, social workers, psychologists, plus a music therapist and an art therapist.

We're predominantly funded to provide sexual assault and family violence counselling to adults, children and young people, but we also have a team that works on what's called harmful sexual behaviours. That is for any young person who is starting to exhibit harmful sexual behaviours. They may be either mandated to come to our service, or they might come by their own free will. Mandated might be through the courts, and that leads to anywhere between 12 to 18 months of therapeutic counselling to look at the behaviours to try and change the trajectory of where we think that young person is going.

Our sexual assault and family violence counselling is after-the-event counselling, so that's around recovery, safety and stability moving forward. We use a range of therapeutic modalities with those clients, including cognitive processing therapy, cognitive behavioural therapy, and we now have several counsellor advocates who are trained in eye movement desensitisation and reprocessing (EMDR), which has proven to be really successful for people in trauma recovery. In addition to this, we have dedicated positions within the service for older adults and for clients living with a disability.

We have a crisis response unit at Monash Medical Centre Clayton, and our Dandenong site, where we partner with the Victorian Institute of Forensic Medicine. So if you are raped or sexually assaulted, you'll come to the clinic for a forensic examination and our staff are there to support before, during and after the forensic examination.

Usually we stay in for the forensic as a support person, and then we always follow up with the client to see whether they want to come in to have an appointment with the MDC nurse or require further counselling from SECASA. We will always get back in touch with the person 48 hours, 7 days, and a month later to check whether somebody wants to come in for counselling.

We work in a multidisciplinary centre (MDC) in both Dandenong and Seaford with Victoria Police, where everyone is under one roof, and it’s a great collaboration. If the police go out to a call and they bring the victim in, we can see them straight away, as part of our response service.

Can you tell us more about the Harmful Sexual Behaviours Program?

The program is for young people who have been referred either by family, or have been mandated by the courts to attend, they might be part of the child protection system, or they might be referred by their school or private practitioners.

Our counsellor advocates, made up of social workers and psychologists, undertake quite a lengthy assessment phase so that they can work out what the best course of therapeutic action is for each young person. Each engagement could be anywhere between 12 to 18 months.

The bulk of young people coming in are 12-14 year old boys, but the program is for young people up to 18. The overarching aim is to provide a safe place for the young person to understand their experience and behaviours and to help manage and reduce the impacts of these experiences.

It’s a heavily used program and our waiting list is long. We are in discussions with the Department of Families, Fairness and Housing at the moment because we are only funded to see 12 new young people a month, and we're already seeing in excess of that.

As the Director, I constantly feel like I'm shuffling our finite resources to try and meet the demand for the program. If you were to ask me what keeps me up at night, it's this waiting list.

If you were to ask me what keeps me up at night, it's this waiting list.

Bridget Wall

It’s a complex problem to solve. Is there a solution that’s not more resources?

Some of our thinking across the sexual assault side of things was the establishment of a brief treatment model. For example, the waiting list at our Seaford sexual assault centre was growing, growing, growing during 2024. So we trained a group of counsellor advocates in a brief treatment model, which is usually around four sessions and it’s goal centred.

It provides clients with safety and stability, and an education component to the counselling to help deal with flashbacks, 80% of people who went through brief treatment decided of their own choice not to continue. The feedback was that was enough to hold them for now.

As a result, our waiting list at Seaford naturally went down. The service is also looking towards using this as a tool to support our intake process into the service.

In harmful sexual behaviours work, though, thinking particularly about those young people that are mandated to attend, how can we think of things differently? Could some of that work be done in a small group setting?

So just last week we interviewed for a group practitioner to support a different method of service provision.

Last year we did a ‘while you wait’ webinar series for young people to access. And that looks like two counsellor advocates talking about how to deal with flashbacks in real-time, your sleep hygiene, relaxation methods and finding safety again. So that’s another approach we could look at to help the waitlist for the Harmful Sexual Behaviour Program.

You’re in an area where you’re dealing with vulnerable people and supporting people who are on the front line. How do you look after yourself, Bridget?

When I look back, there's nothing else I would have chosen to do other than being a social worker. I started in trauma counselling in the emergency department and mental health wards.

I came out with a basic tool kit of social work skills, and I thought, OK, well, I need some more here, and I'm very big on professional development and continuing to learn.

So I went and did a trauma counselling postgrad, I did a psychotherapy post-grad, and I did bereavement counselling training. For me, I just needed those extra things to scaffold me in the room. I worked face-to-face in that space for a good 12 years, and I loved it.

I still think of clients that I worked with and I wonder where they've ended up now, and hopefully I had some impact on their lives and their ability to recover.

When I look back, there's nothing else I would have chosen to do other than being a social worker.

Bridget Wall

There's an optimistic, lovely, forward momentum kind of feeling in talking to you. Do you have any tips or tricks for the rest of us moving through tricky moments?

I think it’s about staying true to your own values. I feel I have very strong values of social justice and equity.

I try to stay grounded, I practise my mindfulness, I practise physical exercise. Making sure that I've still got work-life balance—even though some days it's not that great—but certainly on the weekends it’s important to have the ability to switch off.

I think you should continue to challenge yourself. As I said, I felt as though I needed more education early on, and then when I stepped into leadership, I thought, OK, I need some program evaluation training, so I went and did a grad dip in that and workplace leadership, and then enrolled in my Masters.

I'm not an education junkie, but I like to scaffold the tools I need for the task that's in front of me. Last year I did The Williamson Community Leadership Program which really challenged me.

I was a bit cynical at the beginning thinking, what am I going to get from this?

My buddy had a finance background. And I was thinking, how am I going to learn from someone in superannuation and finance?

And that was quite naive because when I look back, all of my extended education had been in health, social work, and counselling. It opened my eyes to what I could learn from other people, it's so important to look at how other people solve a problem.

What’s on your wish-list for making a difference in the sexual assault space?

I want to grow our primary prevention team because, unfortunately, the bulk of our work occurs after the event. Whether it's after harmful sexual behaviours start to play out, and a young person ends up in the judicial system, or it's after sexual assault where we're dealing with the victim in a very important counselling role.

If you're a state government-funded school, you get funded for Respectful Relationships, which is a program through the Department of Education.

Feedback we are getting is that whilst it's good and it provides some support, it doesn't fully equip teachers and parents with the tools or confidence to initiate and sustain meaningful conversations with young people. There’s a clear need for guidance on how to teach and parent effectively in a world where technology is constantly evolving. So we've come up with our own programs and we have a waiting list to the beginning of 2026. And we are running this on the smell of an oily rag—we've got two 0.6 Counsellor Advocates in this space

So I know that this is an area that we could be doing more of, and we're in the box seat to provide this education. Whether it's through digital platforms or face-to-face learning, we are getting great feedback from all of the parent groups, teacher groups, face-to-face groups with kids in schools and community events we attend.

It is also vital for us to continue to work in partnership with other agencies across the sector to ensure that victim survivors are not left to navigate the multiple service systems alone.

I want to grow our primary prevention team because, unfortunately, the bulk of our work occurs after the event.

Bridget Wall

What prevention education do you think is missing for young people?

Our programs go into discussing social media, what does it mean to leave a digital footprint, sexting, and so on. The Respectful Relationships training doesn't go into that level of detail. Our experience at SECASA allows us to build capacity and the tools and help our young people use critical thinking skills and make informed decisions moving forward. We want to do role plays and activities that really challenge kids to put themselves in the moment and engage them fully so they don’t just turn off empowering them with information and encouraging them to make healthy and respectful choices.

So it's really about having more details for the young people: talking about pornography, online safety, what does online grooming look like, what does cyber cyberbullying look like. We want to be able to have those hard conversations with kids.

I hate to say it, but we’re getting regular calls from schools. We had a call just a couple of weeks ago from a primary school where a current teacher has had allegations made. This is still happening today. So we've set up a new module called Critical Incident Response Package, where we can pick up and deliver information sessions to support parents and teachers in a school with 48 hours notice. This package is crucial.

We’ve also recently appointed a role focussed on the issue of sexual exploitation. Because child sexual exploitation across Dandenong and Frankston is next level. The great collaboration we have with the police is so important because there are some really confronting things that we consider when we’re designing our response services. For example, a recent joint public safety campaign, the police worked with SECASA and parents to educate them on huge spike in food delivery vouchers being distributed to kids in exchange for nude pictures.

So there was a parent forum with the police and essentially said, if you notice your kids ordering delivery food and you haven't approved it, ask them how they're affording it. That was one parent forum, in one suburb across Melbourne, and we know it's happening everywhere. That session was filmed, but I know there’s more we could do here.

But we don't have the resources to do this, we've got the ideas, but we want to take those ideas and put them into more tangible and accessible bite-size pieces.

The ability to respond to a situation, like the example you’ve just given, feels critically important.

What would you like to see as a shift in the next few years?

For me, it'd be resourcing the proactive space to a similar level as the reactive services.

When I started at SECASA, the vision statement was to eradicate sexual assault. Unfortunately, I don't think we're at that point yet, but what can we do to support its decrease. I know that primary prevention plays a big role in achieving that.

A personal example is where my son is encouraging a culture in his football team of being an upstander and not a bystander. How do we give young people the words and the tools to challenge their peers in the moment? Because if you miss the moment, the risk is that the behaviour is then seen as socially acceptable.

Something that I try to live by at SECASA, is trying to respectfully challenge in the moment. And whether that's police, a doctor, or whoever it is, let's leave the titles at the door and respectfully challenge each other.

I think the work that we are doing is incredible. Even though I have a counselling background, I'm in awe of the work that my staff are doing to sit with the level of trauma that they are sitting with. Counsellors are expected to see four clients a day, and that could be four clients with maybe a historical sexual assault, maybe a recent sexual assault, maybe harmful sexual behaviours—that's a lot.

When I'm at my main office and I have my door open, I hear clients leaving and hear their thanks to the staff. The feedback is overwhelmingly positive. So I know we're having an impact, and that's what keeps me going.