Body Safety Australia

There are many people debating the pros and cons of raising the age of access to social media with solid arguments on both sides. But this whole campaign seems tinged with benevolent misogyny. The social media platforms reported to be targeted are snapchat, TikTok, Instagram. Places girls hang out with their friends. The social media not being reported on is Youtube (where the shorts are always one click away from the manosphere) and I don't believe anyone has mentioned raising the age for online gaming, where boys are groomed by predators and steeped in adult behaviour, thoughts and ideologies while they are still children. All we're doing with this is erasing another entire environment for girls while telling boys the digital space belongs to them. Can we not, just for once, learn from the past and address the behaviour of those who cause harm and the systems that allow them to flourish, instead of shrinking the world of potential victims?

Angelique Wan clearly articulating that now is not the time for complacency with consent and respectful relationships education. All students deserve quality education by highly knowledgeable practitioners across the entire years of their schooling. Funding needs to be ongoing to ensure thorough professional development for capacity building of teachers. Evidence-based minimum standards of program content and delivery need to be articulated and all external providers need to meet those standards. Poor consent and respectful relationships education is not neutral, it can be harmful to those who have experienced sexual violence and it can collude with those who enact violence.

Where is the line between proud parental social media posts and online sexploitation of children? What about the line between a social media account meant to facilitate a child's future career and one that becomes a parent's current income? Who own's a child's image? The person who took the video, the legal guardian, or the child? At what age can a child understand the potential reach of their image and all the dark ways it may be perceived? Is there a better option than erasing children from the digital landscape in which we all live?

Boys from Yarra Valley Grammar have rated their girl classmates from 'wifey' to 'unrapable' and still we are acting like this is something new and shocking. This happened to my daughter 7 years ago on school camp. This was happening when I was at school. The only difference is that it used to be written on the toilet wall and now it's a spreadsheet. We have made great headway in changing attitudes of the majority of boys. We have made almost no impact on changing behaviour of the minority. Respectful Relationships has to go beyond conversations of gender equality. We need targeted intervention programs for boys who have been identified as having problematic beliefs and behaviours. Our team meet these boys when they are ten years old. They're just kids who have a real opportunity to change the trajectory of their lives. We know that not all these kids will grow up to enact sexual or gender based violence. But we also know that the adult men who are violent were often these kids. A journalist asked me today if suspension was punishment enough. That perhaps these boys should be expelled. I bet if we actually asked the girls who found their names somewhere on that sliding scale of vile objectification what they think should happen, they would say that they wish is was addressed when they were ten years old when they first asked a teacher for help.