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Areas of expertise: child maltreatment; child protection; abuse; neglect; prevention; out-of-home care; child welfare
Phone: 03 95533607
Email: Daryl.Higgins@acu.edu.au
Location: ACU Melbourne Campus
HDR Supervisor accreditation status: Full
ORCID ID: 0000-0003-0268-8243
Professor Daryl Higgins is Director of ACU's Institute of Child Protection Studies (ICPS). His research focuses on prevalence of child maltreatment, public health approaches to prevention, and child-safe organisational strategies. A registered psychologist, he has been researching child abuse impacts and prevention, family violence and family functioning for 30 years.
Professor Higgins has provided presentations on child-safe organisational strategies to welfare peak bodies, Indigenous welfare agencies, sports and community organisations, regarding organisational risks and child-safe approaches. He has contributed to various reports and provided expert advice to government inquiries, including the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse about how and why abuse occurs, the risks within different sectors that need to be addressed within child-safe organisational strategies, and ripple effects that organisational sexual abuse has on families and others. He is one of the chief investigators on the Australian Child Maltreatment Study - the first national prevalence study of all five forms of child abuse and neglect, multi-type maltreatment, and associated health outcomes across life.