Sexual Safety for Women in In-Patient Mental Health Care Contexts

2. What is Sexual Safety?

Consider for a moment what you understand by the term Sexual Safety. You may wish to write down some of your thoughts or, if you are accessing this resource as part of a course or programme, discuss your thoughts with your group and then record key words or themes. We will return to your original notes later.

Described simply Sexual Safety is the absence of Sexual Harm. However, this does not answer the question in terms of what facets come together to form Sexual Safety or how Sexual Safety is actually experienced and what this means for the women we worked with during the development of this resource. 

In our project meetings we worked together to create mind maps of what Sexual Safety might encompass.

Building a mind map is like putting together a jigsaw, working out how to fit pieces together to create a more complete picture. Use the jigsaw pieces to note key words and themes that we identified as forming the components of Sexual Safety within our mind map exercise. You can return to this reflective exercise to add more pieces or to edit your pieces throughout your engagement with this resource.  Once you are happy with the completed work, you can print out the jigsaw as a record of your learning.

Try this exercise to build your own jigsaw. Click Each Jigsaw Piece to provide a keyword (try to add to the keywords already listed in the mindmap images available above), click the "Add To Jigsaw" button to add a new peice to your jigsaw.

You can view this reflective exercise throughout this resource and add to and edit it, before you print it out in the certificate section if you want to as a record of your learning.

Click to view all the project mind map images below.

To access the jigsaw activity and store responses please permit the use of Cookies and Local Storage. To grant permission access the "User Privacy Settings" (also available in the "menu" panel).

Click each jigsaw piece to add keywords or add a new piece via the button.


By pressing the Reset Jigsaw Activity button below you can restart the jigsaw activity. Importantly all stored jigsaw pieces will be deleted.

Reset Jigsaw Activity