Podcasts

In the first half of this episode, Social Psychologist and Strategist, Dr. Karen Hand discusses her landmark research on ‘Irish Attitudes to Tackling Child Sexual Abuse. A whole of society approach’. Dr. Hand highlights the prevalence data of Child Sexual Abuse gathered in the Irish Sexual Violence Survey 2022, then discusses public estimations of this prevalence and attidudes to this Child Sexual Abuse in the Red C polling and finally ends on the seven themes developed to reframe the key societal barriers in tackling CSA based on interviews with many key stakeholders. Karen particularly focuses on the themes of invisibility and prevention in this discussion of reframing when applied particularly to the Irish context.

In the second half of the episode Karen Hand  discusses her vision of fiction to including a more systematic perspective of Child Sexual Abuse, avoiding individualizing the issue, and to include the message that prevention is possible. Karen Hand highlights key works from Netflix’ “Adolescence”, John Boyne’s “Elements” series and the Kavanagh sisters’ audiobook “The Grip of Childhood Sexual Abuse”. She also discusses how creative professionals can best be advised to create this vision, while maintaining the nuance of the issue as well as creative freedom.

Finally, Dr. Karen Hand tells us about what work she has undertaken now in the field, including running a workshop on how to do participatory research with victim-survivors at IPSCAN 2025 as well as tackling how to best assure commitment from government stakeholders in prevention.