Professionals
Many professionals working in residential care or with foster parents can find it challenging to talk about and deal with the sensitive subject of relationships, intimacy, and sexuality.
Young people growing up in care can be vulnerable to sexual abuse, and it is therefore essential that professionals feel able to get involved in supporting their healthy sexual development.
For teams of professionals working in residential care or with foster parents the Safeguarding project developed a free online course that can help you and your colleagues develop increased knowledge and competence around the subjects of relationships, intimacy and sexuality.
The online course consists of five modules that overlap with the five themes this project deemed most important for the safety and support in to healthy sexual development of young people. These five themes are: ‘values, rules and regulations’, ‘sexual development’, ‘sexual identity’, ‘harmful sexual behaviour’ and ‘talking about sexuality with children and young people’. Find more information on the five themes.
The online course is especially designed to work through as a team. Each module contains short movies, online presentations, information to read, and exercises to do together. Working through a module and practicing as a team will take about one hour (or one team session), so you can walk through the course in a period of five or six weeks. A course manual and a self-reflection instrument are available as well.
