My Fellowship looks at how other countries are preventing child sexual abuse by helping those with a sexual attraction to children before they do harm. In the UK help is currently very limited until an offence has already been committed.

I am a psychologist. However, I came to this subject through volunteering with the charity Circles. Circles helps to integrate individuals convicted of sexual offences into the community and has shown huge success in reducing reoffending. This made me wonder why similarly non-punitive approaches were not being used more to prevent child sexual abuse in the first place.

It is widely accepted that childhood sexual trauma has a devastating impact on mental and physical wellbeing. Helping individuals with a sexual attraction to children is not condoning abuse, but rather stepping back and trying to prevent this abuse from ever happening. This is a sensitive and complex topic that raises challenging emotions and forces us to think sometimes beyond our level of comfort. However difficult these conversations may be, I believe we need to find a way of having them at a policy level. This is what I would like to emerge from my Fellowship.