Megan Bayliss  
44 // Imaginif therapist and director // Edge Hill

Megan Bayliss is a human dynamo. She is go, go, go all the time, physically and mentally. The mother of four and soon to be grandmother is bubbly and bright and when you find out what her greatest passion is, what she does for a day job, you wonder how she maintains her positive outlook.

Megan is a therapist trained in sexual assault counselling. Her clients’ stories are “tragic, unsettling and beyond dinner-table discussion”. Until recently she has dealt face-to-face with sexual assault victims, most of them children.

These days the self-confessed workaholic is taking more of a behind-the-scenes role as director of her company Imaginif, a private protective behaviour practice at Edge Hill. Daily tasks involve supervision, tutorials, training, administrative work and a daily blog posting on the company’s website, which she hopes will become the largest child protection website in the world.

Born and raised in Papua New Guinea in the ’60s, Megan says it was a consequence of seeing the atrocities perpetrated on children and women there that set her on her career path. “That was the formation of my social justice streak,” she says.

Twice divorced with four children, now aged between 25 and 12, and having cared for two foster children over a period of 10 years, Megan knew existing on a single parent pension wasn’t a life for her. “All through school my intention was to do medicine and work in a third-world country,” Megan says. “I ended up doing a social work degree and became very interested in sexual assault.”

Megan subsequently worked for the Australian government in child protection in London and at two sexual assault crisis centres in the Far North before establishing her own practice.

She says survivors of sexual assault are the most inspirational people. She says statistics show one in three people have been sexually assaulted as a child with 85 per cent of the perpetrators, some of them women, well known to the victim. “As child abuse is a secret crime, notification statistics profoundly underestimate the size of the problem,” she says.

Part of the aim at Imaginif is to raise consciousness, change attitudes and work towards a culture of zero tolerance of violence against children.

Megan is now married to accountant Paul Martin, who she is “completely in love with”. “Paul balances me perfectly. He understands my need to do what I do. But I make sure I put aside plenty of time to be with him.”

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