solaceforum.org · Est. 2013
An international community of legal scholars, judges, prosecutors,
investigators and practitioners — advancing the law's capacity to protect children.
Our Purpose
Founded in 2013, SOLACE has been, for over a decade, the forum of reference for the advancement of legal scholarship, comparative analysis, and practitioner exchange on the protection of children from sexual abuse and domestic violence.
We are not a publishing body or a policy lobby. We are a living forum — a confidential space where difficult cases are examined, contested, and illuminated by legal traditions from every jurisdiction. The knowledge forged here informs practice, shapes training, and ultimately influences how courts around the world approach the most vulnerable victims of all.
"The protection of children from sexual violence and abuse is among the most urgent and technically complex challenges facing legal systems worldwide — and among the least adequately addressed."
The Global Challenge
Across every legal tradition and jurisdiction, the prosecution of sexual abuse of children confronts obstacles that are simultaneously evidential, psychological, developmental, cultural, and technological. SOLACE exists because no single legal system has solved these problems alone.
The proliferation of digital communication has fundamentally altered the landscape of child exploitation. Online grooming, live-streamed abuse, encrypted networks, and the cross-border nature of digital evidence challenge the jurisdictional assumptions on which most legal systems were built. Legislation consistently lags behind the platforms it seeks to regulate.
Young people's unprecedented exposure to hypersexualised content — through social media, streaming platforms, and peer networks — has blurred cultural and developmental lines around consent, coercion, and exploitation. Courts struggle to apply fixed legal categories to behaviours whose social meanings are shifting in real time, creating dangerous inconsistencies in judgements across jurisdictions.
Most legal systems were designed for adult juridical persons whose capacity to testify, oppose, comprehend, and express is presumed. When the alleged victim is a toddler or young child, the foundations of evidentiary law — competency, credibility, the adversarial examination — become deeply problematic. The science of child development has advanced far beyond the law's ability to absorb it.
There is no global consensus on the age of criminal responsibility, the age of consent, the admissibility of child testimony, or the evidentiary weight of forensic interviews. Perpetrators exploit these gaps deliberately. SOLACE members work across these legislative divides to identify common ground and model best practice.
The adversarial courtroom is an environment of high re-traumatisation risk for child victims. Cross-examination procedures, confrontation requirements, and the pace of proceedings are profoundly misaligned with what developmental psychology and trauma neuroscience tell us about children's memory, disclosure patterns, and wellbeing. The result is both injustice and systemic underreporting.
The majority of child sexual abuse is perpetrated by known adults within the child's domestic environment. This creates structural barriers — dependency, attachment, fear of family disruption — that shape disclosure, testimony, and ultimately prosecution. Legal frameworks designed for stranger violence are poorly equipped to handle the relational complexity of intra-familial cases.
At the Frontier
SOLACE does not offer settled positions on the questions that animate our forum. We offer a space in which these questions — amongst the most difficult in contemporary legal thought — can be examined with the seriousness they demand.
The cases that reach our members do not fit neatly into existing doctrine. They sit at the intersection of developmental science, digital technology, cross-border jurisdiction, and fundamental rights — demanding not just legal expertise but comparative vision and the willingness to be uncertain.
Our Community
Since 2013, SOLACE has brought together legal professionals who are not observers of the law's evolution — they are its agents. They appear in its courtrooms, draft its reforms, train its investigators, and carry the weight of its failures. The forum's value lies precisely in this experiential diversity: a prosecutor from The Hague and a public defender from Buenos Aires, a digital forensics expert from Seoul and a family court judge from Nairobi, arriving at the same difficult case from different legal traditions.
Members represent every role in the legal ecosystem of child protection.
Confidentiality is the foundation of SOLACE. Cases discussed in the forum are anonymised. Members' identities are protected. The forum does not publish proceedings, does not issue public statements, and does not maintain a public membership register.
This is a deliberate choice. Judges, prosecutors, and investigators who discuss live or sensitive cases require absolute assurance that their participation cannot compromise proceedings, expose them to professional risk, or endanger the children whose cases they carry.
What members share with SOLACE remains within SOLACE.
Membership
SOLACE is a practitioner community. Discussions, case analyses, legal reviews, and forum blogs are accessible exclusively to members — professionals whose expertise and discretion have been verified through a nomination process. The integrity of the forum depends on the trust placed in every person within it.
Active members may access the private forum — including ongoing case discussions, jurisdictional analyses, member blogs, and the document library — through the secure members area.
Access Members Area →If you believe that you or a colleague should be considered for membership, please write to us with the candidate's name, professional background, and a brief statement of how their participation would serve the forum's mission. All nominations are reviewed in strict confidence.
Founded by
Dr. María D. Bermúdez
International human rights expert. Specialist in the legal and institutional protection of vulnerable populations, with particular focus on children. Field experience across four continents. SOLACE was established in 2013 on her conviction that the advancement of child protection law requires a sustained global community of expert practitioners.
Est. 2013 · solaceforum.org