Professor Daryl Higgins is the Director of the Institute of Child Protection Studies at Australian Catholic University. For 30 years, he has been researching child abuse prevalence, impacts, and prevention; public health approaches to protecting children; child-safe organisational strategies; and approaches to promoting child and family welfare. He was a Chief Investigator on the Australian Child Maltreatment Study, which was the first national study of the prevalence in Australia of child abuse and neglect, and its health outcomes. It demonstrated not only the high prevalence of child maltreatment in Australia, but how it increases risk of a range of mental health and health-risk behaviours across life.