A single, intensive day of candid multisectoral exchange on making child protection a winnable battle.
Second International Rise Up Policy Forum | 27 August 2026, Melbourne, Australia
ISPCAN’s second international Rise Up Policy Forum landed in Melbourne on 27 August 2026, a year on from its bold launch at the 2025 ISPCAN Congress in Vilnius, Lithuania . This time, 350 multisectoral experts — including 69 government delegates, alongside researchers, practitioners, survivors, youth and activists, funders, NGOs and faith leaders from 40 countries — came together for a single, intensive day of exchange.
The Forum’s objective was to accelerate scaled progress on ending child abuse and neglect through candid multisectoral dialogue. Janise Mitchell, CEO of Australian Childhood Foundation, extended a warm welcome to international participants and governments and invited delegates to join the critical conversation with hope and courage. ISPCAN CEO Pragathi Tummala argued that child protection is a winnable battle when approached through a public health and system-strengthening framework, and four multisectoral spotlight speakers offered their provocations for greater progress. Throughout the day, across 25 sessions, participants tackled breakthrough strategies and scaled upstream prevention, explored in-depth country case studies and honest examples of challenge and success, examined strategies for sustaining child protection during periods of retrenchment, interrogated the beliefs and values underpinning child protection systems, and much more.
Achieving sustainable funding for child protection was a priority theme running through the day, addressed across four dedicated sessions and underscored by the launch of new tools and resources to support budget advocacy. Find out more below →
“Child abuse and neglect must be recognised as a population-level public health crisis, which every ministry is already paying for, whether through health, education, justice, or lost human potential.
Child protection must shift from reactive, fragmented, project-based response toward a financed, coordinated, prevention-oriented public health system.
The Rise Up Policy Forum’s ‘Mastermind’ working format and six system-strengthening pillars (data, policy, governance, continuum, scale, participation) are catalytic tools for building political will and turning that commitment into implementable, evaluable national action.”
Multisectoral perspectives from the opening and closing plenaries.
Lead Technical Specialist for Practice-Based Knowledge, Safe Futures Hub: Solutions to End Childhood Sexual Violence
Senior Ministerial Adviser, Social Affairs, Ministry of Social Affairs and Health, Department for Safety, Security and Health, Wellbeing and Health Protection Unit, Government of Finland
Head of Crimes Against Children, INTERPOL
World Vision Kenya
Senior Technical Advisor, GIZ: Violence Prevention for Peaceful and Inclusive Communities (VPPIC) Programme
Research Professor of Psychology, Crimes Against Children Research Center, University of New Hampshire, USA
Senior Policy Advisor, Ministry of Social Development and Innovation, Cayman Islands Government
Governments have legal and moral obligations to protect children, yet child abuse and neglect remain widespread and prevention and response systems persistently underfunded.
One reason for this under-investment is that the costs of inaction are often less visible than the immediate costs of child protection services. Those wider costs are spread across children and families, health and education systems, social welfare and justice services, labour markets, public revenues and future generations.
An investment case makes these consequences visible by bringing together evidence on the scale of child abuse and neglect, the costs of inaction, a credible solution, the resources required and the benefits of investment. This brief explains how investment cases are developed and used to inform policy, advocacy, planning and budgeting, and introduces two new ISPCAN tools for generating indicative estimates of the economic costs of child abuse and neglect and the potential benefits of prevention.
Global estimates place the economic cost of violence against children at more than $7 trillion — over 8% of global GDP.
Of 155 countries surveyed, 80% had a national action plan to prevent violence against children — but fewer than one in four had fully funded it.
View the policy brief Building the Investment Case for Ending Child Abuse and Neglect: From Evidence to Financed Action .
The Melbourne Rise Up Policy Forum aimed to accelerate progress in ending child abuse and neglect by convening multisectoral collective action for system-level change.
A working community of practice for governments, researchers, practitioners, funders, advocates and people with lived experience — a space for candid problem-solving on implementation.
To make child protection “a winnable battle” by shifting systems from reactive, harm-after-the-fact response toward prevention that is coordinated, financed and delivered at scale.
Six public health pillars — data; law and policy; governance and multisectoral coordination; continuum of services (universal–targeted–specialist); investment and scaled implementation; and participation of children, survivors and communities — used as diagnostic lenses to identify where a country’s progress is actually stalling.
“Mastermind” sessions, where a government or multisectoral panel brings a real implementation challenge and the room examines it through policy, practice, research and lived-experience perspectives, surfacing transferable lessons rather than one-size-fits-all models.
Helping child protection leaders translate evidence into political will and sustainable funding.
Each country and delegate leaves with a concrete “next move”. Over time, Rise Up builds into an ongoing international network and community of practice and learning — country-to-country and across government, research, practice and community — with learning and capacity building that extends beyond a single event.
Governments are the lead partner in efforts to end child abuse and neglect at scale, and yet they are often not included in communities of practice and learning.
The Policy Forum featured multiple interactive, multisectoral conversations, where knowledge sharing and collaborative problem solving across sectors, disciplines and countries aimed to address the challenges and bridge the gaps preventing faster progress in ending child abuse and neglect.
Government delegates from Pakistan at the Rise Up Policy Forum.
Head of Children and Social Protection Department, Yerevan Municipality, Armenia
Child Protection and Family Services Agency, Government of Jamaica
Paediatric Lead, Child Death Review Programme, Public Health Wales
Manager Practice Development, Chief Social Worker and Professional Practice, Oranga Tamariki – Ministry for Children, Government of New Zealand
Executive Director, National Council on the Administration of Justice, Government of Kenya
Principal Social Welfare Officer, Social Welfare Division, Ministry of Women, Youth, Sport and Social Affairs, Government of Kiribati
Senior Ministerial Adviser, Social Affairs, Ministry of Social Affairs and Health, Department for Safety, Security and Health, Government of Finland
Head of Medical Social Work Unit, Suri Seri Begawan Hospital, Brunei Darussalam
Director, Social Empowerment, Department of Women, Youth & Persons with Disabilities, Government of South Africa — seen with Advocate Mnothowandile Cele, Centre for Community Justice and Development, South Africa
Deb Tsorbaris, National Children’s Commissioner; Sue-Anne Hunter, National Commissioner for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children and Young People; Chris Collett, Acting Deputy-Secretary, Attorney-General’s Department, Government of Australia
Children’s Advocate and National Rapporteur on Trafficking in Persons, Jamaica
Policy briefs and other co-created session outputs will be published on the Rise Up session webpages and resource pages in the coming weeks.
This policy brief explores how governments can protect children by safeguarding safety nets, linking economic assistance with prevention, and grounding services in equity and data — as Fairfax County, Virginia’s outcomes demonstrate.
Session outputs and policy briefs from the Melbourne Rise Up program will be among the articles in this special issue, highlighting bold research, policy analysis, implementation experience and practical innovations that help move child protection upstream, taking a clear focus on prevention.
The Melbourne Rise Up program brought together 25 Mastermind sessions built around six public health-oriented child protection system-strengthening pillars, using multisectoral speakers and interactive formats to dig into practical in-country experience, share cost-effective and high-impact solutions, and explore innovative approaches to data, practice and policy.
Each session focused on real-world challenges that governments and partners face in achieving progress at scale, drawing on the expertise of multinational researchers, practitioners and policy-makers to openly discuss and learn from one another.
Effective governance and multisectoral coordination
Funding, a national action plan, capacity building and scaled solutions
A continuum of child protection prevention and response services
Child, survivor and community participation in solutions
Click into each session to find the presentations and downloadable resources.
Primary Pillar(s): Data and evidence
Primary Pillar(s): A National Action Plan, capacity building and scaled solutions
Primary Pillar(s): Governance and multi-sectoral coordination
Primary Pillar(s): A National Action Plan, capacity building and scaled solutions
Primary Pillar(s): A National Action Plan, capacity building and scaled solutions
Primary Pillar(s): Governance and multi-sectoral coordination
Primary Pillar(s): Governance and multi-sectoral coordination
Primary Pillar(s): A continuum of prevention and response services
Primary Pillar(s): Policy and legislation
Primary Pillar(s): Policy and legislation
Primary Pillar(s): Policy and legislation
Primary Pillar(s): Policy and legislation
Primary Pillar(s): Data and evidence, Policy and legislation, Governance and multi-sectoral coordination
Primary Pillar(s): Policy and legislation, Governance and multi-sectoral coordination
Primary Pillar(s): Data and evidence
Primary Pillar(s): Data and evidence
Primary Pillar(s): A National Action Plan, capacity building and scaled solutions
Primary Pillar(s): Policy and legislation, Governance and multi-sectoral coordination , A National Action Plan, capacity building and scaled solutions
Primary Pillar(s): Governance and multi-sectoral coordination
Primary Pillar(s): A National Action Plan, capacity building and scaled solutions
Primary Pillar(s): Policy and legislation
Primary Pillar(s): A continuum of prevention and response services
Primary Pillar(s): Governance and multi-sectoral coordination
Primary Pillar(s): A National Action Plan, capacity building and scaled solutions
Primary Pillar(s): Data and evidence
This pink and blue ribbon represents our call to rise up to end child abuse and neglect worldwide.
Please download it, use it widely, and make child protection a memorable and visible cause.
Help remove the stigma of talking about this global problem.
The Melbourne Rise Up Policy Forum was built by its community. Our heartfelt thanks go to our partners, and above all to the many organisations, governments and individuals who designed and led sessions in the programme, shared their expertise as speakers, and brought candour and generosity to every conversation.
We are especially grateful to the government delegations who travelled from around the world to share both their challenges and their successes, and to the researchers, practitioners, survivors, young people, faith leaders, funders and advocates whose perspectives made the day so rich. Together, you showed that ending child abuse and neglect is a winnable battle.
Department of Families, Fairness and Housing, Victoria
