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Jade Robertson | TEDx Speaker | Child Safety Speaker | UN/SPOKEN

@jadeleerobertson

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Helping adults make it safer for children to tell the truth.
What made speaking dangerous?
TEDx Speaker | Gubbi Gubbi 🖤💛❤️
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A reintroduction, because people land here at different points in the story.

Some of you found me through child safety. Others came through youth justice, racism, institutional failure, or one of those posts where I’m dancing around a hotel room refusing to make survival the most interesting thing about me.

The subjects can look unrelated.

To me, they keep collapsing into the same question:

What makes truth dangerous, and who gets to decide what happens after it’s spoken?

That’s probably why this page can move from legal analysis to motherhood to oracle cards without me feeling like I’ve lost the plot.

Usually. 😂

UN/SPOKEN is the name I’ve given the body of work growing out of that question.

It isn’t the whole of me. It’s where a lot of the serious questions go.

I’m interested in the moments before silence gets called silence. The responses that teach people what truth will cost. The systems that ask people to speak while quietly deciding whose version of reality counts.

There will also be dancing, swearing, motherhood, weirdness and whatever else is happening in the other rooms of the house.

If something I make gives you language for something you already knew but couldn’t quite name, that’s usually the point.

#UNSPOKEN #childsafety #firstnations #survivor #advocacy taken in Brisbane, Queensland, Australia by @jadeleerobertson

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a month ago

Adults call them small mistakes.

Children experience them as evidence.

A spilled drink.
A broken cup.
Nail polish on the expensive bedding.

They are watching our face before they listen to our words.

Is truth safe here?
Or will honesty cost me connection?

Because disclosure does not begin with the disclosure. It begins in the hundred smaller moments that came before it.

Every response becomes data and that does not stop in childhood. Families, schools, workplaces and institutions are constantly teaching people what happens when the truth enters the room.

That is why “speak up” campaigns fail when nobody has examined the response.

In my full talk, WHAT MADE SPEAKING DANGEROUS?, I unpack the three conditions that shape whether truth feels safe:

The nervous system speaks first.

Response determines risk.

Shame never belongs to the harmed.

This is the work I bring into keynotes, panels and workshops, helping parents, educators and organisations move beyond demanding disclosure and become safer places to receive it.

Comment TALK and I’ll send you the full 12-minute talk.

Speaking and workshop enquiries are open through the link in my bio.

#childsafety #safeguarding #traumainformedparenting #traumainformedleadership #publicspeaker taken in Miami Marketta by @jadeleerobertson

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3 months ago

I was never disconnected from being Aboriginal.

But I did grow up around a kind of silence I’m only now learning how to break.

Not because culture was not there.

It was.

In my family.
In my knowing.
In the parts of me I could feel before I had language for them.

But it was not spoken about enough.

Not loudly.
Not deeply.
Not in the way I wish it had been.
Not because it did not matter.

Because whole generations learnt that sometimes silence was safer.

That is the part people miss.

When culture has been quiet in a family, it is not always because no one cared. Sometimes it is because people were surviving. Racism taught people to keep things private.

Sometimes colonisation did not just take land. It interrupted language. Story. Confidence. Belonging. The ease of knowing who you are without having to go looking for the missing pieces.

So when Mia points at an Aboriginal flag and says, “that’s my flag,” something in me cracks open.

Pride, yes. Always pride but grief too.

Because I think about little me.

The little girl who knew, but did not always have enough around her to understand the fullness of what she knew. The little girl who would grow up and have to find language for things that should have been handed down with ease.

That is what I mean when I talk about culture, silence and belonging.

It is not a neat little lost-and-found story.

It is more like:

This was always mine, but parts of it were made quieter than they should have been.

Now I am learning how to bring it back into the room.

For myself.
For Mia.
For the little version of me who needed more language.
For the ones before me who had to survive by keeping some things quiet.
For the ones after me who deserve to know who they are without whispering.

I am not deepening because I was never Aboriginal enough. I am deepening because silence interrupted what should have been louder.

That is different and it matters.

#NAIDOC #naidocweek #aboriginal #firstnations #indigenousvoices taken in Brisbane, Queensland, Australia by @jadeleerobertson

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3 months ago

Forty. What the actual fuck. 😂❤️

When I was little, I thought 40 was ancient.

I thought by now I’d have everything figured out. The house, the career, the family, the very sensible adult life.

Instead, I’m still at uni, building something I have audacious dreams for, raising a little girl who teaches me just as much as I teach her, and figuring out what the next chapter looks like.

Not exactly the script I had in mind.

I’ve spent some time going through old photographs, and fuck, it’s been emotional.

There are women in those photos I wish I could go back and hug.

There are things I wish they’d never had to experience.

There are choices I still grieve.

But there’s something else I’ve noticed.

For so long, I’ve looked back and seen everything that went wrong.

This time, I could see everything that was happening alongside it.

The friendships. The adventures. The ridiculous nights. The moments of joy I had completely forgotten.

A whole life happening while I was busy believing something was wrong with me.

I think that’s been one of the most unexpected gifts of turning 40.

Realising that even in the chapters where I felt lost, I was still a person worth loving. Still making memories. Still building relationships. Still living.

I don’t believe everything happens for a reason.

Some things should never have happened at all.

But I do know I have a lot of love for the woman who kept finding her way through it.

Every single version of her.

Here’s to 40.

I’m not arriving with everything figured out.

But for the first time in a long time, I’m genuinely excited about how much life is still ahead of me.

And I have absolutely no intention of living the next 40 years quietly. ❤️ Thank you all for the birthday wishes.

#lovenotes #40andfabulous #youaremore #survivor #dearyoungerme taken in Brisbane, Queensland, Australia by @jadeleerobertson

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2 days ago

Today I turn 40.

Forty. Fucking forty. 🥹

I’ve been thinking a lot about the little girl I used to be.

What she’d think of the woman I’ve become. The life we’re living. The things we’ve done that she never could have imagined.

I wish I could go back and let her see that there was so much more waiting for her than the world she knew growing up.

There are parts of my childhood I’ve spoken about publicly. There are other parts I still struggle to put into words.

Things I witnessed. Things I experienced. Things no child should ever have had to live through.

So being here today is a privilege I will never take for granted.

Sometimes I wonder what that little girl would think if she could see the life we’re living now.

The woman we’ve become.

The things we’ve dared to do.

The little girl we now get to raise.

I don’t think she’d care much about the achievements or the things I’ve managed to accomplish.

I think she’d want to know whether we’re safe. Whether we’re happy. Whether anyone finally listened.

There’s something incredibly beautiful about growing into the person your younger self needed.

Because of everything I’ve done in these 40 years, my proudest achievement will always be this:

I became the person who would have protected me as a child.

Happy birthday, little me. We made it. ❤️

#happybirthday #turning40 #innerchildhealing #breakingthecycle #wemadeit taken in Brisbane, Queensland, Australia by @jadeleerobertson

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3 days ago

Last night in my thirties. 🥹❤️‍🔥

I regret to inform my younger self that we have not, in fact, arrived at forty with our entire shit together. 😂

But fuck, what a decade.

I’ve been calling my thirties my excavation era.

Because I’ve spent so much of them digging. Trying to understand myself, unlearning things I once believed, questioning the ways I learnt to survive and how much of my life I’ve spent carrying things.

And this past week, something has shifted.

I finally said out loud how lonely trying to build something of my own has been.

I spent a weekend surrounded by women who described things they saw in me that I sometimes struggle to see in myself.

I cried. A lot.

I also danced around getting ready for photos, laughed, felt beautiful and remembered how fucking good it feels to just enjoy being me.

One thing I’ve been sitting with lately is that my ability to carry something doesn’t automatically make it mine to carry.

And I don’t need to leave behind the woman who got me here.

I just need to stop expecting her to carry everything into where I’m going.

I still have so much I want to do. So much I want to experience.

There’s plenty I haven’t figured out.

But I’m not mourning my thirties.

I’m actually really fucking excited about forty.

Because maybe this next decade isn’t about becoming another version of myself.

Maybe it’s about finally giving myself permission to be all of me.

And I keep coming back to something I asked myself recently.

What’s the point of fighting for a life if we’re not actually living it?

#selftrust #survivor #turning40 #liveyourlife #ageaintnothingbutanumber taken in Brisbane, Queensland, Australia by @jadeleerobertson

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4 days ago

Look, I KNOW it’s only October. 😂🎄

But Thursday night I was invited along to The Prop House Collective’s VIP Christmas showroom launch in Coorparoo, and how the hell was I supposed to say no to that?!

Christmas trees everywhere, decorations from floor to ceiling and enough sparkle to make you question whether there’s actually such a thing as too much Christmas. 😂

Honestly, this place is something else!

I did tell myself I was just going to have a look.

Anyway, a few little owls came home with me. 🦉🤣

A big thank you to @its_jano @kathrose and the team for having me. Such a fun night and what an incredible space you’ve created! ❤️

If you’re in Brisbane and love Christmas, do yourself a favour and go have a wander. Just don’t blame me if you leave with half the shop.

📍 The Prop House Collective, Coorparoo
@theprophousecollective

#invited #christmasinbrisbane #brisbanechristmas #BrisbaneEvents #brisbane taken in The Prop House Collective by @jadeleerobertson

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4 days ago

Our recent Brisbane Screening & Panel event.

The words for this post were sent to me by an audience member whom I know well. She wants to remain anonymous. I looked up the opposite of anonymous; it's "onymous," which literally means "having a name". I have a name for her: "indomitable." Thank you, friend, for being at the event and for your reflections. tlx taken in Brisbane, Queensland, Australia by @jadeleerobertson

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8 days ago

Systemic violence doesn’t necessarily have to be denied.

It can be acknowledged.

Condemned, even.

Then separated from everything around it.

One incident.
One person.
One failure.
One unfortunate event.

Because once we treat every example as exceptional, we never have to ask what connects them.

We never have to look at the conditions that keep producing them.

We never have to question the story that allows the structure itself to remain intact.

That’s part of what makes silencing so powerful.

Sometimes silencing doesn’t erase what happened.

It stops us seeing what it belongs to.

#settlercolonialism #firstnations #indigenousvoices #silenceisviolence #childsafety taken in Brisbane, Queensland, Australia by @jadeleerobertson

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9 days ago

One of the promises I made myself very young was that I would never use what happened to me as permission to hurt somebody else.

I would not become cruel because I was hurt.

I still believe that.

What I’m realising is that somewhere along the way, I took that promise further than I intended.

There is a difference between refusing to abuse your power and refusing to fully possess it.

Fuck. That one has been sitting with me.

I became very good at being the regulated one. The reasonable one. The one who could explain behaviour that probably deserved a much less reasonable response.

There is something particularly fucked about how easily self-control can become self-abandonment.

Especially as women.

We’re allowed to be strong. Just not threatening. Assertive. Just not difficult. Angry, maybe, if we package it beautifully enough that nobody else has to feel uncomfortable.

I don’t think humanity requires me to be harmless.

I don’t think healing means reaching some enlightened place where nothing makes me fucking furious anymore.

There are things I want access to that part of myself for.

When something needs protecting.
When “keeping the peace” preserves the conditions that caused the harm.
When politeness is being used to keep everybody quiet.
When somebody needs to hear absolutely fucking not from a person who means it.

Watching this Rise with @heartled_warriors @nadinemuller footage now is strange.

My body was doing something months ago that my brain is only just finding language for. I pushed. Screamed. Broke something. Took up space. Then I walked away still me.

Power did not make me dangerous.

It gave me a choice.

I spent a long time believing becoming more powerful carried the risk of becoming like people who abused theirs.

I’m starting to wonder if staying afraid of my own power would simply be one more thing their behaviour got to take from me.

I don’t want to give them that too.

This realisation was cracked open by @matriarchnova post on rage. Her words helped me separate something in myself I hadn’t before. Credit where it’s due, because this thought started there.

#femalerage #survivor #selftrust #risesisterrise #traumahealing taken in Brisbane, Queensland, Australia by @jadeleerobertson

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11 days ago

I keep thinking about how ordinary harm can sound once you put it into institutional language.

Redress.
Review.
Compensation.
Inquiry.
Recommendation.

All important things.

But there is something deeply unsettling about how quickly language can make something unbearable sound manageable.

A child can be harmed and suddenly we are discussing eligibility criteria.

A community can warn that something will cause damage and the conversation becomes implementation.

People can tell you exactly what is going wrong and somehow the system still finds a way to file that information without being fundamentally changed by it.

That is the part I cannot get comfortable with.

Accountability cannot only be what happens once the harm is undeniable.

At some point it has to include what we did with the warning.

What we changed because somebody told us.

What we were willing to interrupt before there was another apology to write.

Because there is a very big difference between a system that knows how to respond to harm and a system willing to stop causing it.

There’s a much longer version of this argument on Substack if you want to go deeper.

#firstnations #childsafety #childprotection #truthteller #indigenousvoices taken in Brisbane, Queensland, Australia by @jadeleerobertson

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9 days ago

The moment people learned Jane Doe says she willingly drank, took drugs and consented to sexual activity with two men, something shifted.

Suddenly, those details started being treated as evidence against what she says happened next.

But they aren’t.

In the material now public, Jane Doe distinguishes between the sexual activity she says she wanted and the sexual activity she says she did not.

That distinction matters.

A woman can want sex and still not want that sex.

She can consent to one person and not another.

She can say yes earlier and no later.

What I find more revealing is what happens once we know she wanted some of it.

We start examining her.

How much did she drink?
Why did she take the drugs?
Was she sexually adventurous?
Did she enjoy herself?
Did she willingly go into that room?

Somewhere along the way, the question shifts from:

What did she consent to?

to:

What kind of woman was she?

That is not the same question.

Because consent is not a character assessment.

A woman does not have to be sexually conservative, sober, cautious or perfectly behaved before her boundaries become credible.

Regret does not turn consensual sex into sexual assault.

But consenting to something does not make everything that follows consensual either.

Both of those things can be true.

What worries me about this conversation is how quickly we still reach for a respectability test when deciding which women we believe.

As though she has to behave enough like our idea of a victim before we will take her seriously.

That is the part I think we need to talk about.

#cornell #consentmatters #sexualviolence #victimblaming #consentculture taken in Brisbane, Queensland, Australia by @jadeleerobertson

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10 days ago