Service providers hope to expand family and domestic violence prevention measures in schools

Beyond the crisis centres and police check-ups, work to teach children behaviour to help prevent family and domestic violence is underway in schools, and service providers say there is room to expand.

In one program, an Anglicare WA facilitator has been teaching students at Perth’s St George’s Anglican Grammar School about respectful relationships as part of a program titled “It Only Takes One”.

The program aims to teach the students to identify unhealthy behaviour and how it can be addressed.

The program runs in all year levels at the school with the content tailored to each year group.

Recently, a group of 70 year eight male and female students from St George’s spent time outside their maths, English and science classes to learn about respectful relationships as part of the program.

For 14-year-old Jaya, what she learnt helped her expand her understanding of what abusive behaviour and violence in relationships looks like, and how to prevent it.

“I always thought it would happen to adults, or people who were older or people who were 25, but when they showed the videos of teenagers, it made me realise it doesn’t really matter what age you are, it just matters on the people in the relationship,” she said.

Jaya was part of the session, in which students learnt about topics including violence in relationships, coercive control, the types of abuse and how they could play out in teenage relationships, including sexual and image-based abuse.

They also discussed statistics around gender-based violence, such as how women were more likely than men two be killed or hospitalised as a result of violence by an intimate partner, or how 97 per cent of victims of violence experienced it from a male perpetrator.

It comes during a year when more than 58 women have been allegedly killed in circumstances of domestic violence in Australia.

For Jaya’s classmate Isabelle, 13, the topics covered in the session could be discussed even sooner.

“A lot of the kids in our year already know about a lot of this stuff,” she said.

“I definitely feel in the news I’ve heard, it’s in married relationships where the husband might abuse the wife.

“But I feel like these days a lot of younger kids are in relationships, like our age and younger.

“I feel like those relationships aren’t shown as much, like there might be some violence with them, but most people focus on older relationships.”

Little steps lead to change

The school’s principal Tina Campbell said the session formed part of the holistic education for the students and the feedback was overwhelmingly positive.

“It allows students and validates them in having a voice,” she said.

“It’s about not normalising what they see in the media or what they see in television or films, but actually speaking up and having the courage to do so.

“It’s in the little steps that they will make a significant difference for their futures.”

Anglicare WA runs up to nine sessions across the year for these students.

St George’s was one of five pilot schools that took part in the program in three years ago.

Anglicare says the program started in 2020 and has reached 30,000 high school students since then.

Up until this year, the initiative was privately funded, receiving $100,000 a year through donations and the Anglican Schools Commission.

That changed when it received a $100,000 boost from the state government, as part of $3 million in from the Department of Communities for primary prevention projects, allowing the program to expand to public schools.

Early intervention vital

Anglicare WA CEO Mark Glasson said focusing on early intervention programs was imperative.

“We try to get upstream to tackle issues before they become critical ones that we’ve seen this year with the level of fatality,”  Anglicare CEO Mark Glasson said.

“We need to continue to focus on safety for women and children.

“We absolutely need to continue to work with men who use violence in their relationships about changing their behaviours, but we also have to stop the flow of people who are falling into violent relationships.”

‘We need to start younger’

Michael Flood is a researcher in domestic and sexual violence prevention, and has expertise in standards of respectful relationships programs.

“There are now literally hundreds of studies demonstrating that if done well — and that’s a big if — violence prevention and education in schools can have a positive impact,” he said.

“It can shift the attitudes associated with domestic and sexual violence, and can lower actual rates of violence perpetration.”

He said there were five key criterion for ensuring the courses were effective.

They included a “whole of school” approach, where face-to-face education was complemented by strategies intended to build a respectful culture — like having policies and processes for responding to victim survivors and holding perpetrators accountable.

Another factor was making there were enough contact hours.

“A one-off half-hour lecture to school students is very unlikely to shift the attitudes and behaviours,” Dr Flood said.

“What will shift behaviour is a five hour or 10 hour or 20-hour course that involves interaction and participation.”

He also said making programs inclusive and culturally sensitive was important, as well as ensuring there was “robust impact evaluation”.

“It involves collecting information before the program, and after the program on the attitudes and behaviours … then following up later up to three to six months later to see if the changes that the program generated have persisted.”

The Anglicare WA program’s success is measured through questionnaires, but Mr Glasson said he hoped there would be more rigorous evaluation as the program expanded.

Dr Flood agreed education in the space should be done early.

“Leaving our education until boys and young men are 16 or 17 is too late, we need to start younger.”

Multiple programs underway

The state government recently committed $1.5 million to a respectful relationships program in schools, which service provider Starick has been at the front of since 2019.

In four years of operating, 84 public schools have opted in to be involved in the respectful relationships program, which mainly entailed running sessions with teachers and school staff to develop effective policies, procedures, school curricula, and link them to resources in their local community.

“It links with their existing curriculum, but it’s also about a whole school approach,” Starick CEO Leanne Barron said.

Program director Vanessa Harvey said a major gap in that program, which ran in 23 schools this year, was its limitation just to the public education system, which had been addressed in the recent round of funding. 

“The main part of the program is for about a year, it’d be great to be able to provide more intensive support for schools for a longer period,” she said.

“But with the resources we’ve got, that’s not feasible at this stage.”

For Ms Barron, there was still much to do, beyond Starick’s main work in crisis response.

“We’ve all just got to turn this issue around and start making a difference at that end,” she said.

“We’ve had situations where the children of women who were in the refuge are now coming back to refuges as adult women, and that’s something we just don’t want to see.”

The Starick respectful relationships program is independently evaluated by Curtin University, and Ms Barron said it received about $750,000 a year to operate.

The WA Department of Communities was contacted for comment.