Last term, when Andrew Taukolo handed teenage boys worksheets featuring tropes about sexual assault and abuse and asked them to consider if the statements were fact or myth, he noticed this cohort had a different response to those previous.
The boys, aged 13-18 and sitting in a circle in a Queensland classroom, read through statements such as: “Women like to exaggerate how bad abuse is”; “Abuse only happens when a man is provoked by a woman”; “If the abuse was really that bad, then the woman would leave”.
“Most of the young men generally say the statements are myth,” says Taukolo, who started the Men4Respect program, which runs consent education programs in five schools in Queensland. But he says last term a lot of them started to bring up Amber Heard.
“The young men would say things like: ‘But did you watch the Amber Heard trial? She could be just like Amber Heard, she could be a liar and just want money or just want attention,’” Taukolo says, referring to the vitriol hurled at Heard on social media during Johnny Depp’s defamation suit against her. “And quite a few of the young men would then change their minds and say: ‘You know, women do actually lie a lot. Most women do lie a lot.’”
A wake-up call
Since former Sydney private school student Chanel Contos revealed the alarming prevalence of sexual abuse in high schools and launched the Teach Us Consent petition calling for earlier consent education, there has been progress in attitudes towards sexual violence, consent and gendered abuse in Australia. This progress includes Contos’s campaign achieving its goal of mandatory consent education in all Australian schools, starting next year.
“It was a wake-up call for a lot of young men,” Taukolo says. “But there’s still an issue.
“When we dive a bit deeper [in the class] and ask what are your actual views on consent and give them some scenarios, that’s when we’d find the alarming attitudes.”
Some young men consider asking for consent to be necessary only insofar as to avoid getting into trouble, Taukolo says. “We then try to unpack that, and build their understanding of consent through empathy.”
A survey of 500 boys, undertaken bythe Man Cave, a school program promoting boys emotional wellbeing and healthy relationships, showed students understood respect and consent and were eager for more education, the charity’s CEO Hunter Johnson says.
But Johnson says a new challenge has arisen during the pandemic. “Due to the last two-and-a-half years, the young men are more socially and emotionally behind than their female counterparts. There’s more disrespect in the classroom, particularly towards female and non-binary classmates.”
Ojasvi Jyoti, co-head of curriculum at Consent Labs, an organisation that gives consent education in schools and universities, says he’s observed fear among some young men about being wrongly accused of sexual assault.
“There is a lot of rhetoric around, I think from social media or media in general, that they could get falsely accused,” he says. “Even though statistics show that only 5% of assault allegations are false.”
However, Contos says she has seen more young men standing up against toxic behaviour by their peers. “I think in the past a lot of young men felt uncomfortable with these sorts of things, or didn’t really know how to be active or anti that behaviour.”
Attitudes are changing, Full Stop Australia’s CEO Hayley Foster says, “but it is slow” and the toxic signals men and boys receive over time from pop culture and the media can act as “counter forces” to change.
“When you have young people that are imbibed in an environment of misogyny, objectification of women and girls and gender roles and expectations that are supportive of violence, then [advocates] can sometimes feel as if you’re losing the battle,” she says.
Providing people with an alternative view of the world is crucial to changing attitudes, Foster argues. “It’s about giving young people opportunity to reflect and investigate and be critical around the influences that they’re exposed to.”
This is where consent programs can be particularly beneficial, advocates say, so long as they nurture empathy and reflection.
The power of programs
If young men are given a non-judgmental space in these programs to have “messy” conversations it helps them build emotional intelligence, Hunter and Taukolo say.
Those leading the programs say they can create real changes in attitudes. In the eight-week Men4Respect program, 16% of the young men at the start of the program agreed that “men should take control in relationships” but this dropped to none after the program, Taukolo says. More than a third initially agreed that “if a woman sends a nude image to her partner, she is partly responsible if he shares it without her permission” and by the end this dropped to 10%.
‘It is not the fault of 13- and 14-year-old boys’
Prof Michael Salter, an expert in criminology and gendered violence at UNSW, says having these honest conversations between young men to unpack the anxiety and tension in male sexuality can be transformative – but it is not a “silver bullet”.
Salter says he is concerned this focus on children “exculpates the adults that have the responsibility for social transformation”.
“It is not the fault of 13- and 14-year-old boys that they grow up in an unequal and sexist society,” he says. “It’s our fault.”
Salter says more men must take the burden from woman to reinforce the message of respect and equality. “Frankly, until we see more men, in a professional capacity as well, deciding to work on it I think we’re going to continue to struggle.”
Bianca Fileborn, an expert in criminology at the University of Melbourne, agrees. “There’s a lot of focus on young people, which is obviously important, but what about the rest of the community?” she says. “There’s a real need to actually engage in some broader community education around consent and sexual ethics as well.”
A similar thought was on 29-year-old Beatrice’s* mind as she watched the push to change the culture of consent in Australian schools. She has been the victim of three separate non-consensual sexual acts in recent years by men a similar age to her.
“Having consent education is a huge win,” she says. “But I do wonder, what about the rest of our population that never got this education - and where it’s also a problem?”
Taukolo says during workshops at schools sometimes it is the teachers or staff members who are problematic, not the students.
“And when these young men go to their sporting clubs and to their coaches and their mentors or their other leaders, do those people have the capacity to dissect these complex issues?”
But Taukolo says his team feels they are making a difference. “A lot of us see ourselves in the young men we’re teaching and a lot of us didn’t have those opportunities to have that type of growth at those ages,” he says. “So we do feel proud.”
In the final lesson of the Men4Respect’s program, the boys again sit in their yarning circle, this time holding a piece of paper with personal reflections on what they’ve learnt.
“The best part was being able to open up without any judgement from any of you,” one of the students says. “My main takeaway is how to treat women in a respectful way.”
Another says: “My main takeaway is to treat everyone the way you’d like to be treated.”
*Name has been changed to protect her identity
