It’s a crisis and as far back as 2015 when Rosie Batty was named Australian of the Year, and brought the devastating impact of domestic violence into our national conscious, we’ve known it to be a colossal issue.
Yet for whatever reason, as a nation we’ve not taken the necessary steps, or been willing to do so, to effectively curb its insidious rise.
While the age of perpetrators varies considerably, in schools disturbingly high numbers of young men simply don’t seem to know how to treat women and cannot acceptably handle rejection.
Hanna Saltis is a researcher at Curtin University in Perth who works extensively in relationships and sexuality in the secondary school space, with a special interest in affirming sexual and gender diversity.
Saltis, who also has a background in psychology and linguistics, runs relationship workshops for WA teachers through the university’s Relationships and Sexuality Education (RSE) Project.
“[As a country] we’ve increasingly been recognising the impacts of violence, specifically, and violence against women,” Saltis tells EducationHQ.
“We have at least two Australians of the Year who were acknowledged for their advocacy and courage in speaking out against men’s violence in the public sphere, yet while the Government is making an effort, the reality is that many of the initiatives and the funding that they’re throwing at this don’t seem to actually be working.”
So far this year, 28 women in Australia have died as a result of gender-based violence. At the same time last year that figure was half as many.
With this week’s widely reported expulsion of two Yarra Valley Grammar School students over a spreadsheet in which female classmates were given rankings – a jarring example of young men’s often disrespectful and objectifying attitude towards young women – schools also have their work cut out.
The incident follows students from the Knox School, one of Sydney’s most elite private schools, setting up a chat room in September 2022, where vile child abuse material, racist and homophobic videos and rantings on violent misogyny were posted.
Similarly, in North Sydney in 2020, a document produced by Year 12 students at Shore School for their muck-up day was leaked to the Sydney Morning Herald, and included tasks such as kissing a girl under the age of 15 and an “Asian chick” and having sex with a woman who weighs over 80kg, is aged over 40 or one who is deemed 3/10 or lower [unattractive]”.
By extension, these attitudes lead to twisted and dangerous ideas of what constitutes healthy relationships, often characterised by control, abuse and dependency.
Society has let them down
“I don’t think it’s conscious, to be honest,” Saltis says.
“I think many young boys and men don’t really understand these behaviours; I think it’s a failing on a societal level to teach young boys and men to cope with negative and difficult emotions.
“Using control and abuse helps them to alleviate or prevent the actions that might be making them feel those negative or difficult emotions of jealousy and so on.”
Researcher and sexologist Hanna Saltis says the focus in schools should be far less on harm protection and more about how to better recognise and foster healthy relationships.
Saltis says comments like ‘I don’t want you to see your girlfriends’, or ‘you can’t be friends with any other guy friends’, are simply a mask for the young men trying to deal with their own insecurities and low self-esteem, potentially.
Many of the young boys Saltis speaks to would, and do, change their behaviour far earlier, if they receive good messaging about how to cope with rejection and how to be collaborative in a relationship, and if they are taught how to manage jealousy, build a sense of self that isn’t based on ideals of wealth, or power and sexual conquests, but instead, one that really focuses on being a good citizen, having higher levels of empathy and viewing girls as people equal to them.
The researcher says portrayals of masculinity have long fallen short of acceptability, however there are people trying to change this and, in the media, actively trying to promote a different kind of masculinity that isn’t based on power and wealth.
Teens take their cues from parents first, then from TV, celebrities, social media influences, etc, Saltis explains, but for too long the focus in schools has been preoccupied with harm protection and not pivoting to how to better recognise and foster healthy relationships.
“What young men are asking for when we speak to them in research, is guidance on how to be good partners, but the education they currently receive has focused on what not to do,” Saltis says.
“So they know what constitutes being a bad partner, but they don’t know how to be good partners.
“And [by extension], when our education system can’t recognise that young people have a sexuality, and we falsely believe that talking about sex will cause them to start having sex, then we don’t prepare them young enough to properly take care of themselves or others.”
A program decades in the making
Back in 2014, the WA Department of Health, to its credit, recognised that there was gap that needed to be filled in giving teachers formal evidence-based training in RSE, and so began funding the workshop program in which Saltis now works.
Like the RSE team at Curtin, it understood how incredibly important schools are as sites for learning about oneself and developing a sense of identity, and teachers actually providing key relationship skills and examples of how people engage respectfully with one another.
Whether you're involved in pastoral care, a HPE teacher, head of a learning area, involved in Student Services, or an Aboriginal education officer – all of these roles provide opportunities to deliver RSE or at least reinforce, or model, some key messages.
However, despite a decade of the workshop, teachers nationwide still receive very little explicit training on how to talk about relationships and sexuality – indeed, currently there are only two universities in Australia that have units dedicated to the area for preservice teachers.
So whether it be inside the formal classroom or in the playground or on a sports field, Saltis says it’s really important that teachers, regardless of their specialty area, aren’t unconsciously reiterating prolific messages that endorse unhelpful stereotypes about gender roles.
“…and that they’re properly equipped to explicitly teach about relationships and sexuality, and respectful relationships and a whole host of other topics that we cover in the workshop,” the researcher says.
“Whether it be a pastoral care role or a classroom teacher, they might supervise students on camp, all of these tasks provide opportunities to deliver RSE or at least reinforce, or model, some key messages.”
Catering to ITE students and in-service teachers
The workshops themselves run in the form of two models.
“So we deliver to preservice teachers at Curtin University through the school of education, and we do an undergraduate unit,” Saltis explains.
“For our undergraduate preservice teachers, it’s a semester unit, 12 weeks of intensive three-hour seminars once a week – and that’s mandatory for health and phys ed ITE students.
“It’s an elective for anyone else, so, for example, this year, we have a few early childhood teachers, and we have a maths teacher – so we have people who are just interested in teaching the topics spanning a range of different teaching and learning areas."
The second model is tailored to in-service teachers, is free and only has 40 spots available each year. It involves a two-day workshop aimed at educators who may be experiencing specific issues, or they simply want some upskilling in the area, or they’re HPE teachers who went through a program that didn’t have mandatory RSE components. Preservice teachers can also attend the two-day workshops.
“So we also get other school staff who are in pastoral care, or sometimes heads of learning areas, or involved in Student Services, or even Aboriginal education officers – anyone who might be working really closely with the students in this area," Saltis says.
The positive method of delivery in the workshops fostering healthy relationships and advocating the supporting of teens through romantic relationships, is really an exercise in harm reduction and protection.
“So it’s a reframing slightly, but we still do outline all of the issues and the consequences of not having healthy relationships, personal, interpersonal, and systemic levels,” Saltis says.
“In delivering these positive messages, instead or alongside, it lessens the potential for blame and encourages people to have a sense of responsibility and ethical citizenship, which we hope young people can internalise.
“And then by using engaging strategies, it kind of demystifies the topic of relationships, which can be a little bit hard to pin down, particularly if we’re talking about respectful relationships.
“So rather than spend a lot of time doing workbooks, where these concepts can seem really theoretical and foreign, we have our people doing the activities, and working together, and in that way they’re already experiencing collaboration and respect, which we know are essential components for healthy relationships.”
Saltis says feedback from workshop participants is overwhelmingly positive.
“Basically, our teachers love, love, love this program, they are so positive,” the academic gushes.
“Occasionally, we’ll get feedback that gives us suggestions on what to cover – so for example, recently, people have been asking how they can address Andrew Tate in their schools, and it’s meant that we’ve gone out and found an excellent resource, a really practical toolkit to help teachers with just that!”
Significant room for National Curriculum improvement
Nationally, unfortunately, RSE is something of a dog’s breakfast.
Encouragingly, the revised Australian Curriculum V9 and recent mandates aim to ensure consent education is provided in an age-appropriate way across all Australian schools, however, NSW, Victoria and WA continue to create their own curriculum, meaning there is no consistent approach nationwide.
A checklist just released by Bloom-Ed, a national peak body committed to ensuring evidence-based RSE is offered to all young people in their homes, schools and communities, starkly magnifies just how disjointed education in this space, with still much room for significant improvement if we are to reduce sexual and gender-based violence in this country.
Nowhere in the National Curriculum is the act of ‘sex’ mentioned; respectful relationships are mentioned repeatedly, without sufficient explanation of what should or should not be covered by these lessons; guidance around puberty education is vague; the requirement to teach young people about safer sex practices to prevent STIs and different contraceptive options is only listed as an ‘elaboration’; while the concept of reproduction is mentioned in various places, there is no expectation or requirement for schools to teach about it.
Pornography is also listed as an elaboration when it comes to properly instructing young people about media literacy, and there is no requirement for any student in Years 11 and 12 to receive lessons about health, relationships, or sexuality.
While a comprehensive and clearly worded curriculum is a dream, for now it’s heartening that after a decade of honing and shaping and building its RSE project, Curtin University is showing no signs of going anywhere.
For more information on Curtin University’s RSE Project, click here.
Family Planning Alliance Australia (FPAA) uses its clinical experience to inform evidence-based education programs across Australia. For more information, click here.
