‘Teachers are describing something different’: the escalating culture of misogyny in Australian classrooms

Teachers – more than 70% of whom are female – are coming up against what Monash researchers Stephanie Wescott and Steven Roberts have termed ‘a resurgent male supremacy’. Photograph: Paul Miller/AAP

In the commonly used violence prevention metaphor, the “river of prevention”, schools are perhaps the most prized piece of “dry land”. A captive audience, young minds at their most malleable – this is where violence can be stopped before it starts.

The Our Watch CEO, Patty Kinnersly, singles out respectful relationships education as “one of the most crucial initiatives to eliminate this violence”. “There is no space for culture wars on whether or not respectful relationships education should be urgently implemented,” she wrote in an op-ed for the Canberra Times as homicides spiked in 2023. “Delay on this issue is leaving our young women experiencing violence, and, in the worst cases, it is leaving them dead.”