In the commonly used violence prevention metaphor, the “river of prevention”, schools are perhaps the most prized piece of “dry land”. A captive audience, young minds at their most malleable – this is where violence can be stopped before it starts.
The Our Watch CEO, Patty Kinnersly, singles out respectful relationships education as “one of the most crucial initiatives to eliminate this violence”. “There is no space for culture wars on whether or not respectful relationships education should be urgently implemented,” she wrote in an op-ed for the Canberra Times as homicides spiked in 2023. “Delay on this issue is leaving our young women experiencing violence, and, in the worst cases, it is leaving them dead.”
Only Victoria has mandatory Respectful Relationships education (in government schools), which was introduced in 2016. Under the guidance of Our Watch and others, Victoria has set out to nail the holy grail of prevention education: the “whole-of-school” model.
Picture your local school. Now imagine if that school could be re-engineered into a miniature Iceland: a microcosm of gender equality, run according to gender-equal policies and procedures, staffed by teachers and leaders who openly reject rigid gender norms and champion equality and respect.
This would be a whole other level of education for students – not just cognitive learning, but a revolution in their school’s norms, modelled by the adults in charge. Now, with the picture of your local school as a gender-equal microstate, imagine how that example could radiate beyond the front gate, to influence the norms and attitudes not just of school parents but of the entire surrounding community. In a nutshell, that’s the whole-of-school model. According to Our Watch, this holistic approach is “the single most important criterion for effective violence prevention and respectful relationships education in schools.”
This vision – that re-engineered schools could spread gender equality to the broader community – is impressive and ambitious. The notion of this being realised in government schools across the state – and, eventually, across Australia – is probably easier to hold from a distance. The real world, unfortunately, is a bummer.
Government schools are facing enormous challenges, widespread teacher burnout and underfunding so chronic that many teachers are forced to buy their own classroom supplies. In this already strained environment, teachers – more than 70% of whom are female – are also coming up against what Monash researchers Stephanie Wescott and Steven Roberts have termed “a resurgent male supremacy”.
“While sexual harassment in schools isn’t a new problem,” they observe, “teachers are now describing something different: an escalating culture not only of sexual harassment, but of language and behaviours expressing belief in male superiority and other misogynistic views.” In one national survey, teachers say they’re being propositioned, threatened with rape, asked for nude photos, physically intimidated, and having their classes disturbed by young male students moaning sexually during class – even in primary school.
The Independent Education Union in Victoria says violence from students against female teachers is also escalating. This has become more pronounced since Covid lockdowns, along with a noticeable deterioration in students’ mental health and an increase in other problematic behaviours. That’s something Daniel Principe, who delivers education to boys, has noticed “absolutely everywhere”.
“Attention spans, resilience, distractibility and more sexualised language. Covid was such an overdose of screen time and everything that goes with that, and we are now seeing some of the consequences of it.”
Young people are already the highest-risk age group for sexual violence, but in more recent years the nature of that is changing. Every week in Victorian primary schools, an average of six incidents of child-on-child sexual abuse are reported to police. High-school students, too, are sexually exploiting fellow students – not just physically, but with new tech and deepfake apps. These stories are becoming legion – like the teenage boy at Bacchus Marsh grammar, a regional private school in Victoria, who created and circulated the likenesses of fifty female students superimposed onto explicit sexualised images.
“The photos were mutilated, and so graphic,” said one of the mothers at the school. “I almost threw up when I saw it.” When these incidents generate huge media attention, Deanne Carson, CEO of Body Safety Australia, gets phone calls from other schools reporting “copycat” incidents. “I think the media cycle and the use of social media has escalated the likelihood of copycat behaviours, and driven that down in age,” she says.
This is why Carson gets frustrated with how prevention education is funded, as though it’s a pure form of “primary prevention”.
“Every single classroom I go into, I have children who have been raped. I have children who have sexually abused other children. I have children living with family violence. I’m doing primary prevention in those spaces, but I’m also doing early intervention and response work.”
When schools confront the terrible occurrence of peer-on-peer sexual assault, they may call a sexual assault counselling service like Laurel Place. Kerinda is a mental health social worker, who for the past fifteen years has led Laurel Place’s Reset program supporting young people who engage in harmful sexual behaviours. Once young people have offended against another child, the fallout is substantial: “They’re often labelled as ‘pedos’ or sex offenders, so they’re carrying a lot of shame.” It’s the job of Kerinda and the reset team to help them address that shame and stop them using sexual violence.
Fifteen years ago, her referrals would mostly be from child protection for kids aged 10 and older, who generally had complex trauma backgrounds and were living in out-of-home care. But now there are referrals for kids “as young as five or six, and they are coming from daycare and childcare centres”. Kerinda says the big change she’s noticed is that many of these kids haven’t experienced sexual abuse themselves – instead, their harmful sexual behaviour appears to be linked to watching free online porn.
“The porn these kids watch is traumatic – the images can be very violent and abusive – and it’s also quite often extremely addictive.” Exposure to this type of pornography, especially at such a young age, is not only traumatic in itself but can significantly impact sexual development and has been linked by other experts to the increase in sexual violence among children and young people.
“We have a younger generation engaging in more sexual violence than previous generations,” says Professor Michael Salter, the director of Childlight at the University of New South Wales. “When these children commit sexual violence, the acts are more extreme, because pornography has expanded their sexual vocabulary.”
On average, young people are 13 when they get their first lessons in sex and intimacy from free online porn. Almost half find it accidentally via online searches or pop-ups. In much of this porn, degrading and painful sex acts are unremarkable, as are explicit racism and misogyny. In the majority of these clips, women not only go along with degrading treatment but are almost always grateful for it. Sahar, a young woman living in Tasmania, describes how that trope was at play when she was anally raped as a teenager: “I think he liked that it was painful for me. The next morning he told me to give him a blow job, and I did, and he slapped me while he was doing it. And I went, ‘What the fuck?’ And he was like, ‘Oh, most girls like that,’ like, ‘Mature girls like that.’” In recent research from Our Watch, seven out of 10 young people said the porn they watched often showed aggression and violence against women.
In parallel to these horror stories, of course, there is another truth – that this generation of boys and young men are “already way more switched on” than previous generations. “They blow me away with their insights,” says Principe, whose passionate commitment runs through him like an electric current.
“I have Year 7 boys popping their hand up and saying, ‘Sir, that’s objectification, that’s sexualisation’. And I’m like, How do you even know what that is? So I get to see this insight and empathy from young people that’s extraordinary … But I witness that in parallel with this increased callousness in some boys, a kind of performative toxicity. And what I’m hearing all around the country – even in the more progressive and alternative schools – is that these social norms, especially boys using violence, tearing down girls, making judgements based on skin colour and tearing other boys down – they are already manifesting by Year 6.”
Given all this, it’s perhaps unsurprising that the “whole-of-school” model – which seeks to inculcate gender equality and respect in teachers, students, parents and beyond – has had limited success. A multi-year evaluation found no evidence that Respectful Relationships education had any impact beyond the school. Parents, though supportive and interested, knew little of what was being taught. Teacher attitudes were improved – and there was data to prove that. But there was no data on the attitudes of students. Are the attitudes of Victorian high school students improving? Are they getting worse? It’s hard to say. We only get vague inferences, like “student attitudes towards gender and family violence were more varied [than teachers’ attitudes] and have greater scope for change”, and compared to primary school students, influencing the attitudes and behaviours of high school students was “more challenging”.
But even more critically: is this education actually changing behaviour? Are there fewer students being victimised? Fewer students perpetrating? The evaluation doesn’t say.
The whole-of-school model is best-practice for a reason. In Carson’s work, educating parents is actually the most critical part, because children cannot – and should not – be expected to carry the burden of attitude and behaviour change alone, especially when their parents hold conflicting values. “Obviously, not all parents will be positively invested, especially those who intend harm,” she says. “But loving parents who have not previously examined their parenting practices or their beliefs around gender norms engage earnestly in these conversations.”
It’s impossible to say whether a decade of Respectful Relationships education in Victoria has led to lower rates of gender-based violence among its young recipients. But in the classrooms Carson works in every day, she sees young people who are better informed and more empowered.
“I see young people who are able to be more assertive and are better able to spot red flags and put in boundaries before things escalate to being unsafe. I also see young people who are much more able to intervene if they’re noticing patterns of behaviour in their own friendship group.” Not just young people who will call things out, says Carson, but those who will call things in.
“I recently worked with some teens where there had been a sexual assault in the friendship group. The group actually sat down with the boy, and went, ‘This is the impact of your actions, and this is what you need to do.’”
“We work in small groups, and we work one child at a time. If a child has been abused, we give them opportunities to ask for help now, rather than when they’re in their 30s or 40s … opportunities to ask for help and to understand that not all relationships look like the ones they’re living with. If a child is enacting sexual violence, we give them the opportunity to ask for help. For me, this work is not utopian. It is one child at a time, one classroom at a time, one school at a time, one town at a time.”
• This is an edited extract from Jess Hill’s Quarterly Essay: Losing It: Can we stop violence against women and children? (Black Inc., $29.99) published today
