Published deliberately
How this could go wrong.
Every resource like this one carries risks. Most of them are never written down anywhere you can see. Ours are on this page, including the ones we rate as serious.
If you work in child protection, early years education, or research, you have a private checklist you run when somebody outside the field turns up with a resource for four-year-olds: does this person understand what they could break?
This page is our answer, offered before you have to ask.
| What could go wrong | What we did about it | Still outstanding |
|---|---|---|
| Red gets away, so a child who could not get away concludes they failed. | Red freezes first, on the page, and the story treats it as ordinary. Her escape needs no cleverness — she walks out of a door. Near the end the book says four times, in four different ways, that freezing, complying, being fooled, or telling years later is never the child’s fault. | Survivor-informed and child-development review |
| The Wolf becomes “stranger danger.” | The Wolf lives in the village. Everybody knows him. Red likes him, and the book says so before anything happens. Most children who are harmed are harmed by somebody they know, and a story about a stranger in the woods teaches watchfulness in the wrong direction. | CSA-prevention specialist review |
| Children conclude that abuse only counts if it felt wrong. | Red notices one thing while feeling perfectly fine, and a later thing while feeling frightened. Neither is presented as the correct signal. Intuition is never made a requirement. | Manuscript and lesson audit |
| The story teaches children to distrust their neighbours. | The final spread deliberately restores the village exactly as it was: the baker still bakes, the neighbours still wave. The book states that the world has not become a place where Red must be afraid of everybody. | Child-development review |
| A child discloses during a lesson and an adult handles it badly. | The classroom materials are published as an unreviewed draft and marked as not for classroom delivery. No pilot will run before safeguarding sign-off. | Institutional safeguarding approval |
| The adult receiving the material is the unsafe person. | The story instructs children to find more than one safe adult, and to tell somebody else, and somebody else, until somebody hears. The safe-adult activity deliberately includes adults outside the household. | Protection-professional review |
| Private safe-adult information gets publicly displayed. | The safe-adult sheet goes home or is handled privately. The materials explicitly say not to post children’s personal safety networks on a classroom wall. | Educator usability test |
| This website becomes a route for children to disclose. | There is no form, chat, comment field, account, upload, or message box anywhere on this site, and there will never be one. We do not collect children’s names, images, contact details or accounts. | Complete |
| Illustrations sensationalise, sexualise, or frighten. | No nudity, no explicit acts, no depicted touch between the Wolf and the child, controlled physical distance throughout, and no monstrous villain design. The danger is conveyed by behaviour, never by appearance. | Art review before publication |
| The resource excludes non-speaking and disabled children. | The story offers three ways to tell: words, pointing, and drawing. A spoken “no” is never the required response, and verbal disclosure is never the only valid one. | Disability-inclusion review |
| Jurisdiction-specific legal guidance goes stale and misdirects somebody. | Every legal statement links to its official source and carries a review date. Helpline details are verified before publication and re-checked quarterly. | Quarterly source refresh |
| Commercialising child safety. | Every piece of safety information on this site is free and stays free. See where the money goes. | Ongoing |
Where we currently are
Most of the right-hand column says the review has not happened yet. That is accurate, and it is the reason the classroom materials carry a draft warning and the reason we make no claim about what this programme achieves.
We will say that this book improves knowledge, recognition, or help-seeking when a study has been designed and completed that supports it. Not before. And we will not describe any person or organisation as a reviewer, partner or supporter without their written agreement on file.
If you can see something we have missed, we would much rather hear it now than after it is printed.