Over the last year there has been a welcome increase in awareness of violence against women in Australia. Thanks to campaigners such as Rosie Batty and a significant increase in news reporting, more people understand the complexities of family violence and sexual assault and the cost to human lives.
Although the increase of awareness is the first step, and the real-life stories are vital to our collective understanding, the current public discourse runs the risk of immobilising communities. We need to use this new level of understanding to move towards preventing the violence from occurring.
I notice this shock and immobilisation regularly. When I introduce my work as 'violence prevention', people seem to hear the 'violence' part very loudly. Their responses suggest they are imagining the work of women's shelters, and police providing the important crisis response.
Although inextricably interconnected and equally important, responding to and preventing violence are very different things.
Prevention means stopping something before it occurs, which actually means creating something else. In terms of violence prevention, it means creating communities based on respect and equality.
But what does this actually look like? How do we create new ways of relating to each other?
If we had a problem with numeracy, we would invest in maths. We would look towards improving our education systems to build knowledge and skills. Instead we have a problem with gender equality and relationship violence. And so, let's improve knowledge and build skills in respectful relationships.
Respectful relationships education is one of the proactive strategies designed to contribute to the prevention of gender-based violence in our communities.
Curriculum based programs aim to provide young people with the skills required to lead respectful relationships and to challenge the gender norms and stereotypes, attitudes and social systems that allow male violence against women to continue.
Importantly, successful programs do this in a way that is interactive and fun, and meets the needs of young people in age-appropriate ways.
Although rarely featured in the public discourse, there are a number of respectful relationships education programs being designed and implemented across Australia. But we have a long way to go to ensure all children and young people receive this education.
Travelling on a Churchill Fellowship, I recently had the opportunity to learn from innovative respectful relationships education programs and approaches across the USA and Canada.
One of the most valuable things I learned was the importance of integrating the programs into schooling systems. Those that have experienced the