Liz Walker is an educator and advocate responding to porn harms, dedicated to culture-shifting initiatives that equip children & young people.

Liz provides schools and community education as Managing Director of Youth Wellbeing Project: educating for tricky conversations. Initiatives include IQ PROGRAMS, a whole-school educational package designed to equip educators for the task of supporting kids and teens to author their future; and Porn Resilient Kids: equipping families for tricky conversations through children’s books and resources.

Liz is also Co-Chair of Connecting to Protect: a Global Response to Address the Mental Health and Safety Consequences to Children and Young People Accessing Online Pornography. Previous roles include co-founding the Australian registered health promotion charity eChildhood. Key focusses included progressing Age Verification forward in Australia and collaborating to develop a public health approach to mobilise responses that reduce the harms of pornography on children and young people. Additionally, Liz facilitated parent education for four years as Director of Health Education at Culture Reframed: the global lead in solving the public health crisis of the digital age.

Well-connected internationally, Liz regularly provides consultancy to government, non-profit, and professional organisations. Delivering everything from keynotes, student cohort presentations, parent workshops, and professional development throughout Australia and Internationally, Liz is also a regular contributor to media outlets. Liz provides strategies to counteract porn culture through a ‘Critical Porn Analysis’ educational response, and her work includes the children’s books: Milly’s Message and Hamish and the Shadow Secret.

When I was six years old, I was shown a porn magazine with page after page of graphic sexual images. The scenes swirled around in my mind and gave me a wrong idea about sexual behaviours, relationships and even myself.

I often wonder if things would have been different for me, if as a six year old, I had talked to a trusted adult and asked for help. At the time however, I thought that I would get into trouble if I talked with someone. I wasn’t even sure anyone would listen or understand. How very wrong I was. As it turns out, asking for help would have been the very best thing I could have done.

Fast forward to today and troubling images can be found just about everywhere – far more graphic and harmful than what I encountered. Unfortunately, children of all ages can now be potentially exposed to hardcore, graphic porn on the Internet at the click of a button – images that their eyes were never meant to see.

My hope is that mums, dads, teachers, carers and safe grown ups everywhere will become more aware of online dangers and the impact that unsafe images have on our children’s lives. And that parents would speak with their kids BEFORE they see internet porn, so that they have the skills to know how to respond.

Milly’s Message and Hamish and the Shadow Secret have been written to inspire and facilitate educated and healthy conversation about online pornography.

The goal – to empower kids to take charge of troubling images, teach them to listen to their inner voice that helps them make safer and more positive choices, and reach out and speak with a trusted adult.