Grace Tame

After being groomed and raped by her maths teacher when she was just 15 years old, Grace Tame has turned her traumatic experience into advocacy for survivors of child sexual abuse and has been a leader of positive change for over a decade.

Recognising the injustice of Tasmania’s gag order that prevented survivors from self-identifying publicly, Grace offered her story to the #LetHerSpeak campaign created by Nina Funnell, along with the stories of 16 other brave survivors. In 2019, she finally won a court order to speak our under her own name, making her the state’s first female child sexual abuse survivor to do so.

In 2021 Grace Tame was named Australian of the Year. A momentous day and year for Grace followed with awareness at the forefront and a powerful voice, not only for victim survivors but as a leader of men and women of all generations.

Now, Grace is dedicated to eradicating child sexual abuse in Australia, and supporting the survivors of child sexual abuse and is the CEO of The Grace Tame Foundation.

Her focus is around enabling survivors to tell their stories without shame, educating the public around the process and lasting effects of grooming and working with policy and decision-makers to ensure we have state, territory and federal legal systems that support survivors, not just perpetrators.

She is also a passionate yoga teacher, visual artist, and champion long-distance runner, having won the 2020 Ross Marathon in 2:59:31. She was diagnosed as autistic at age 20, and talks candidly about how this affects her life and work.

On 27 September 2022, she released her number 1 best-selling memoir The Ninth Life of a Diamond Miner, which was nominated for three Australian Book Industry Awards, including New Writer of the Year and Biography Book of the Year. She is a columnist for The Shot and co-hosts their weekly podcast with The Chaser’s Charles Firth, Jo Dyer, and Dave Milner.

An open book about her experience, but even more passionate about preventing this from happening to other children, Grace speaks from the heart and will have her audience simultaneously inspired and in tears.

Grace Tame Talks About:

The Unfair Fight: The tech arms race between child sex offenders and law enforcement

Society is digitally dependent, increasingly encrypted and technology is enabling the proliferation of child sexual abuse material. Leading child protection advocate Grace Tame and Associate Professor Campbell Wilson have united to fight back.

This conversation explores tech-facilitated corruption of cognition and morality. In the online child exploitation landscape, law enforcement is in an arms race against offenders using an exponentially evolving arsenal including generative AI, social media, bots, the dark web and sextortion.

Grace and Campbell emphasise the need for survivors’ lived experience to be centred in tech-based child exploitation prevention, intervention and response measures.

The call on communities to get informed and question mainstream narratives. It’s incumbent on us all to pressure tech giants and governments to protect children.