Rosemary Sinclair and Christine Stewart founded NAPCAN on 2 August 1987 with the support of Professor Kim Oates. NAPCAN began coordinating National Child Protection Week (NCPW) across Australia in an effort to engage and educate all Australians to understand they have a part to play in keeping our children and young people safe.

For over 30 years, NAPCAN has been running the annual NCPW campaign. Each campaign builds on the strengths of previous years and has evolved to provide support to communities to act on the core message, “protecting children is everyone’s business”.

As it stands today, NCPW aims to engage, educate and empower Australians to understand the complexity of child abuse and neglect and work together to prevent it. The campaign does this through sharing evidence through webinars and events as well as creating resources in order to empower communities to have conversations regarding children’s safety and wellbeing.