In 2022, a group of twelve Korean therapists decided to partner with Shama. After the initial workshop they decided to translate the Shama materials of the Let’s Talk: Keeping Children Safe from Sexual Harm into Korean and organise a series of workshops with Korean parents across Auckland. The group delivered the workshop through the Auckland Korean School, a Saturday parenting Korean program held in various schools and neighborhoods (from the Northshore to South Auckland) to support Korean parents and their children. In most of the workshops there were approximately 20 parents including men and women.
The therapists facilitated the workshop entirely in Korean, providing parents with culturally relevant guidance and practical strategies to protect children from sexual harm. As in the Shama prevention workshop, some of the topics they covered were what is child sexual abuse, learning the proper names of the body parts and which ones are private, how to start having a conversation about this topic with children, and how to prepare children for different scenarios (sleep over, staying with babysitter, etc.). The workshop was also an opportunity to share resources with the Korean parents so they could seek support if they needed.
The workshop also included examples from Korean culture that supported parents’ understanding of the content. By translating the program and offering it in a familiar, community-based setting, they made child prevention education accessible to Korean-speaking families in Auckland. In addition, the fact that the facilitators were Counsellors and medical professionals gave the Korean parents the reassurance that the content they learnt was well thought and useful for them and would help the whole community keeping children safe from sexual harm.
