Every child safety programme ends with the same instruction. Tell someone.
Millions of children cannot. And there is an industry that has learned exactly what that silence is worth.
What HOPE is today.
HOPE is a plan, not yet a charity. Hope intends to found it when she can give at scale. This page sets out what it will be, and why, so the thinking is on the record from the start.
It is not registered. It takes no money, keeps no mailing list and is not recruiting. If anyone asks you to donate to HOPE, it is not us.
A child who cannot tell is not a harder target. He is the preferred one.
Predators do not choose at random. They select for silence. Sextortion is not a crime of confusion. The child knows what happened, who did it and what was filmed. He cannot say it out loud.
That silence is not a side effect of the crime. It is the business model.
Then there is the part that should stop you.
We spend years teaching disabled children to let adults handle their bodies. Every day, for good reasons. We call it therapy. We call it personal care. We praise him for cooperating, and we are right to.
We train compliance into him. Then we hand him a curriculum that says: say no.
This is not a feeling. It is a literature.
Children worldwide live with a disability. About one in ten.
The largest group of children on earth for whom the standard curriculum was never written.
The odds of sexual violence for a child with a mental or intellectual disability.
Compared with children without a disability. Across all disabilities, the odds are almost three times higher.
Reports of financial sextortion every day in 2025.
More than 50,000 across the year, to one reporting centre alone. The daily rate rose 37 percent on 2024.
At least three dozen teenage boys in the United States have taken their own lives after being targeted.
The crime depends on a child believing he cannot tell anyone.
One classroom workshop.
It raised seven and eight year olds' knowledge of unsafe touch, secrets and telling an adult. They still had it twelve months later.
Evidence that it frightens them.
Across 24 trials, these lessons improved knowledge and protective behaviour. They did not make children more anxious or afraid.
In 2025, one reporting centre received 61.8 million images, videos and other files of suspected child sexual exploitation. Behind them are children who could not tell someone in time.
Nor does this rest on a single paper. A 2022 update pooled 98 studies and nearly 17 million children. It found that 31.7 percent of children with a disability had experienced violence. A decade of further research did not soften the finding.
A 2025 review found only thirteen school safety programmes built for children with intellectual and developmental disabilities. Few had been properly tested.
You cannot moderate your way out of this. You cannot arrest your way out of it.
The only intervention upstream of the camera is the one that gives the child the words.
HOPE will not deliver this itself.
One charity cannot reach every child who needs this. So HOPE is designed as a supply, not a provider.
The child's version.
The evidence based core, rebuilt from the first line for children who communicate differently. Not the standard curriculum with a symbol stuck on it. It includes a way to tell that works when speech does not: a sign, a card, a page on his device.
The adult's version.
Disclosure from a non speaking child is almost never a sentence. It is a refusal. A regression. A body that goes rigid at a particular door. HOPE will teach the sixty seconds after a child tells you. It is the most consequential minute of that child's life, and almost nobody is trained for it.
Openly licensed, permanently.
A teacher in Nairobi, a service in São Paulo or a ministry in Jakarta will be able to take all of it, translate it, put their own logo on it and run it the next day. Without asking. Without paying. Printable, with no device and no login. That is the point.
Measured and published, failures included.
A ministry does not adopt a programme because it is moving. It adopts it because a peer reviewed paper says it works, and because it has already committed to the approach: education and life skills is one of the seven strategies the World Health Organization asks governments to implement [8]. The evaluation is not administration. It is the distribution strategy.
If a child is one day taught this in a language we do not speak, from materials we never got credit for, HOPE has worked exactly as designed.
Two things that are not negotiable.
Nothing runs until the safeguarding is finished.
Working with children checks. A two adult rule that is never relaxed. A child safety officer who is not the founder. A complaints route that does not run through HOPE. This programme will lead to disclosures. That is the programme working. So no child enters a room until it is written down what happens in the sixty seconds afterwards.
The curriculum will never be sold.
Not to a school, not to a government, not in ten years when it would be lucrative. Open licence from the first day, and it cannot be revoked.
If you are worried about a child now.
- If a child is in immediate danger, call Triple Zero (000).
- To report online child sexual exploitation in Australia, contact the Australian Centre to Counter Child Exploitation at accce.gov.au/report.
- Children and young people aged 5 to 25 can call Kids Helpline on 1800 55 1800, any time.
- If this page has brought something up for you, call Lifeline on 13 11 14 or visit lifeline.org.au.
- Outside Australia, contact your local police or child protection service.
Where every figure comes from.
- UNICEF. Seen, Counted, Included: Using data to shed light on the well-being of children with disabilities. New York: UNICEF, 2021. Nearly 240 million children, about one in ten, have a disability. UNICEF uses a broad definition covering several areas of functioning. Read the report.
- Jones L, Bellis MA, Wood S, et al. Prevalence and risk of violence against children with disabilities: a systematic review and meta analysis of observational studies. The Lancet, 2012; 380(9845): 899 to 907. Funded by the World Health Organization. Odds ratio 2.88 (95 percent confidence interval 2.24 to 3.69) for sexual violence across disabilities; 4.62 (95 percent confidence interval 2.08 to 10.23) for mental or intellectual disability. View on PubMed.
- Fang Z, Cerna Turoff I, Zhang C, et al. Global estimates of violence against children with disabilities: an updated systematic review and meta analysis. The Lancet Child and Adolescent Health, 2022; 6(5): 313 to 323. 98 studies and 16,831,324 children. Prevalence of violence 31.7 percent; prevalence of sexual violence 11.3 percent. View on PubMed.
- National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. CyberTipline 2025 data. Published 2026. 21.3 million reports; 61.8 million images, videos and other files; more than 50,000 financial sextortion reports, an average of 137 a day, a 37 percent rise in daily reports on 2024; at least three dozen teenage boys in the United States known to have taken their own lives after being targeted. View the data.
- Walsh K, Zwi K, Woolfenden S, Shlonsky A. School based education programmes for the prevention of child sexual abuse. Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews, 2015, Issue 4. 24 trials. Programme participation did not increase or decrease children's anxiety or fear. Read the review.
- Guastaferro K, Shipe SL, Connell CM, Letourneau EJ, Noll JG. Implementation of a Universal School Based Child Sexual Abuse Prevention Program: A Longitudinal Cohort Study. Journal of Interpersonal Violence, 2023; 38(15 and 16): 8785 to 8802. A single 50 minute Safe Touches workshop for second graders, most aged seven or eight; knowledge gains held at twelve months. There was no control group. View on PubMed.
- Bright MA, Ortega DP, Bodi CB, Walsh K. School Based Victimization Prevention Education Programs for Children and Youth With Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities: A Scoping Review. Child Maltreatment, 2025; 30(2): 357 to 379. Thirteen programmes, most with weak research designs. Read the review.
- World Health Organization. INSPIRE: Seven strategies for ending violence against children. Geneva: World Health Organization, 2016. Education and life skills is one of the seven strategies. Developed with partner agencies including UNICEF, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the World Bank. Read INSPIRE.
Every figure here is traceable to published research or official reporting. Where the evidence is weak, this page says so. The 2012 review is explicit that its underlying studies vary widely and that better research is urgently needed. HOPE will not overstate its case to move you.