Communities taking action
Find out how other communities around Australia are making a positive change and promoting respectful attitudes.
Knowing where to begin can be challenging, but small steps can make a big difference.
The power to end violence
Port Adelaide Football Club has created a program to educate high school students across South Australia about violence against women. The Power to End Violence against Women program focuses on respectful relationships and how young people can play a role in preventing violence.
Jake – Youth Programs Manager to group of young boys: Looking forward to working with you guys today, we’ve got some really important topics based around respect, a lot of the work that you guys are doing currently within the schools.
Jake: So we run a number of different community programmes through the football club. We’ve got quite a number of programmes run through our Aboriginal and youth streams, and this programme here is our Power to End Violence Against Women programme.
It’s one where we go out to secondary schools and we work with year 10 male students to educate them about the issue of violence against women but also respectful relationships.
Jake to group of young boys: Big challenge that we had, and obviously a discussion point is, if we see something that is disrespectful towards women, whether it’s directly or indirectly within the community, what are some of the tools that you guys have learned that would be able to address that? And it is a challenging thing to do, but what happens if we don’t do it?
Kye – Workshop participant: I think it’s just pretty basic, like, if you see something that’s not right, just stand up. I know it’s such a hard thing to do, especially if someone you respect and you like, but if you stand up, it just cuts it off.
Ross – General Manager: Power to End Violence Programme was an initiative between Centacare Catholic Family Services and the State government, and we were approached to deliver a programme based around respectful relationships.
So we co-designed it with Centacare Catholic Family Services, put a lot of time and energy into getting the right content in there, and we worked with the Education department on ethics and understanding the Keeping Safe Child Protection Curriculum, so we’re working within that curriculum so we can go into schools and compliment the delivery of that.
Jake: It can be a difficult subject to talk about, especially for young men, so it’s just about creating that rapport and building that relationship and making them comfortable to speak about the issue around violence against women, and what they can do to address the issue in the community.
Ross: Within the programme, I guess, I could really see the role that the football club and the players have in breaking through to these young people. Because when they’re hearing the same messages from their teachers, to have someone else from a trusted brand that they see on the sporting field speak about respectful relationships, they sit up and listen.
So, we’ve had a variety of different stories, from the students that have engaged within the programme and re-engaged with different engagements that we have, such as leadership days or family days – and how they’re interacting with the women in their lives differently and how they’re also encouraging their peers or family members to be treating women with a greater respect.
Jackson – Workshop participant: My brother, he’s not in high school yet, but I remember telling him about the program, about how, going to Adelaide Oval, and all that. And then when I got home I’d tell him about it and I told him what I learnt, and then I remember, two or three days later he comes back to me and he says that he’s been telling people at his school as well, his primary school.
So he’s even… Coming from what I’ve learned, if we do have younger siblings we could always help them spread it as well.
Jake: We’re in a position where we’re able to have a positive influence. So we heavily use our players, and our coaches, and our staff to go out into the schools and be positive role models for these students with hope that they can then model positive behaviours in the different areas of their lives.
Jackson: Being verbal abused to physical abuse as well, sexual abuse, yeah, you just got to put a stop to that as soon as you see it.
Jules – Workshop participant: Put yourself in their footsteps. You wouldn’t want to be treated like that.
Kye: Using your values to kind of guide you, with respect, honesty, just keep your values and you’ll be right.
Special thanks to Power Community Limited and Port Adelaide Football Club
If you want to know more about Power Community Limited, please visit portadelaidefc.com.au/community
Violence against women, let’s stop it at the start.
Healing through the art of yarning
Leprena is a centre for the Indigenous community where members can weave new connections and share their stories. It’s a place for people to safely and openly have conversations and learn from one another about preventing domestic and family violence.
Grace – Workshop facilitator: I’d like to welcome everyone to the art group Healing through the art of yarning. The intention of this community engagement project is to give people new hope, to bring together and have a yarn while doing artwork. I hope through this group we can all weave new connections share stories, and learn from each other.
Alison – Centre Manager: Before I start having the conversation I really feel that I need to, and want to, honour and pay respects to the Muwinina people, as the traditional owners of the country Leprena sits on, and that we gather on, pay respect to my elders, past, present, and future.
Leprena is open to the Aboriginal community. We are a centre based around the love and beauty of Aboriginal culture, how Aboriginal culture has a way of healing and connecting both First and Second Peoples.
Two years ago we started our family violence prevention programme called Listening With Our Heart. Which in our language means listening with our hearts. Where a group of Aboriginal women, and other interested peoples, started the hard conversations around family violence and its impact on women and children and how could we safely have them in a cultural context.
The old adage is knowledge is power, and indeed that has been the case here. The biggest role we can play is to model behaviour in a more equal way and to also to start to engage our young people about the importance of, or expectations or misconceptions, about the roles of particular genders. Be more mindful of how we interact with those conversations and the message that we project as well.
Taylor – Workshop participant: It’s important for little girls to be taught the way that they should be treated and little boys how they should treat women. I have a son, as well as my young daughter, both of those things are very important to me.
I want for there to be conversations, I want to end this with our generations. I want for our children to grow up in safe places. For them to know that they are loved, that their communities got their back.
Annie – Workshop participant: I see them being influenced by the strong women in our family and I hope and pray that the violence and disrespect stops there, stopping there.
I’ve got five granddaughters and three grandsons and those five granddaughters are very strong, they will not be treated like that. And that’s because their mother and myself have enforced that nobody has the right to treat you like that and they’re brought up to stand up for themselves.
And this place has helped us and we all stand up, we all speak for each other.
Grace: The workshop come about of the team sitting down and really thinking about how we can get the community engaged. We don’t separate the kids and the adults, we’re all one group that learn and feed off of each other. The young people, the teenagers are influenced in the group by knowing that they can approach their elders for advice.
With the kids that I work with, the main message would be that boys won’t just be boys. And it’s not that, it’s a deeper issue than that and somethings aren’t okay and some things can’t be justified.
Alison: If we do not speak out we’re going to create another generation where women feel like this is what they should expect, this is all they deserve. So we need to get that message out there to change the next generation, keep the kani going, we must keep the talk going.
The change that I want to see is a real self-awareness within everybody. And we become a safe community and an example to the rest of the community.
Special thanks to Leprena UAICC Tasmania
If you want to know more about the United Aboriginal and Islander Christian Congress, please visit uaicc.org.au
Violence against women, let’s stop it at the start.
Empowered to create change
When she was just 14, Josie created a petition calling for the government to include information about domestic violence and the support available for young people in schools. Her petition attracted more than 100,000 signatures, and led to changes in the NSW school curriculum.
I’m Josephine. I’m 17. That’s a good rhyme.
Yeah, I’m studying to be a counsellor one day. I’m doing my Certificate II in Community Services.
I originally started with a change.org petition and over a few months that got 100,000 supporters. And it was put in the newspaper so I was really glad that it was just getting out there. But I think it took about a whole year going through Parliament, to try and implement into the curriculum. It was just a few months after my mother passed away.
I did the petition purely for the reason that I was sitting in my own sadness dwelling on all this stuff and I was just thinking there’s other kids going through this. And I felt the need to tell people my story, so other people around me felt power to do something.
Around the time that the petition actually was created, I had a few people reach out to me and ask what to do. And that was pretty hard because at the time I’m kind of thinking “what do you do?”.
Well, I’m really glad that people felt like they could speak up and felt like they had a safe space to talk to someone. It’s a big issue with young people especially with them knowing boundaries and being told to keep it quiet. They need to know that they’re first of all not alone, and that there’s also people willing to help them.
It’s not impossible that people can change and learn respect, but I feel like if you taught it at a younger age, just like simple things like manners, it just sticks for you.
Teachers are a big influence on the way that a child wants to learn. Keep a kind of friendship with the students, ’cause it really helps to think that you have a support system within the school, especially when it’s somewhere that you are every single day.
The people that surround you definitely are a big factor in how you’ll feel. I was lucky enough to be surrounded by just so many lovely, kind people that because I spoke out, were aware of what was going on and they were just so kind and loving to me.
I don’t think that I’d be who I am today without the experience that I’ve gone through. It made me come out a stronger person and I just feel more empathy towards other people.
Be standing big for what you believe in, regardless if it’s on a big platform or a small one. If it’s in your small community then it still gets around. Just one family, that that’s their whole life that it changes and helps. It doesn’t matter the scale.
Special thanks to Josie Pohla
Violence against women, let’s stop it at the start.
Influencing the Influencer
Recognising how difficult it can be for young women entering a predominantly male workforce, the National Electrical Contractors Association was keen to promote attitudes around respect and gender equality in their young apprentices. They engaged NIRODAH, an organisation working in violence prevention, to run workshops with their employees around how they can be upstanders of respect.
Paul Zappa – Founder of Nirodah, to workshop participants: In your relationships, whether you have a relationship now, or a future relationship, I want to try and pull apart what we think in a relationship. What qualities, actions, values am I looking for in that partner.
Paul: My name’s Paul Zappa. I’m the founder and director of Nirodah. Nirodah is a violence prevention company. The Buddhist word Nirodah means end of suffering, so everything we do is driven from helping people working through their pain and ideally preventing it in the first place.
Angela Gaylard – Founder of Collective Impact Consulting: I was working with NECA and was there for about four years, working on a programme to help increase women in non-traditional trade areas, particularly electrical for them.
Paul: And we’ve noticed the willingness of the young people to engage in our sessions. We’ve also noticed the connection between staff and student, so very much our work is influencing the influencer, that would be a teacher, that would be a coach. In this setting it is the teachers initially.
Angela: I think that’s a really big part of all of these programmes, because if those influences don’t speak up and aren’t the, I guess change leaders, there isn’t that safe place for maybe people that aren’t as confident to speak up.
Paul: We’re encouraging the students to realise they influence others, and they are an influencer as well. When that penny drops, we’ve started to see change, and so we try to pull that apart and say how could you go from being a bystander to an up stander?
Angela: [It’s] not at all an approach of here’s what not to do. It’s raising those awareness levels, it’s giving them really easy skills that they can implement both, you know, in the workplace, in their personal lives and relationships, that really make a huge difference.
Paul: For instance an activity around juggling, and it’s to pull apart the motion intelligence and to taking risks and noticing habits and behaviours. The change I’ve seen is that it fully embrace being a cultural shift of our whole community, rather than this is something that those students are going to have to learn to do.
Miranda Powell – Student at National Electrical and Communications Association (NECA): Being responsible for your behaviour and it’s a responsibility for you to say something when you see something that’s inappropriate or putting someone else in an uncomfortable position or it’s having the capacity and language to be able to do that.
Jack Todaro – Student at NECA: I got cousins, I got a younger sister, I have, you know, the apprentices on site as well. New people that come along who, they don’t know the culture necessarily and we have a chance to actually shape that a bit earlier.
Steve Marshall – NECA Training Operations Manager: The students and staff and, it’s a really, they like talking about it, ’cause they can see the difference to make with them and people are more comfortable to stand up for themselves now, as well. That we’ve given the power to speak up and stand up for themself and realise that what’s happened or what’s been happening to them isn’t good enough, and they’ve got the right to feel safe and comfortable in a work site.
Paul: Authenticity of the young people’s saying that this place is safer and a better place to come to learn as a result of doing this work has probably been the thing that we’re most proud of. We hope the long term gain, we hope that that’s translating out of thing centre and into their workplace and into their family lives and into their relationships.
In Bankstown, NSW the RESPECT project is teaching young boys about respectful relationships through music. The program encourages respectful attitudes, and helps participants understand how they can play a role in preventing violence against women.
Craig Taunton – R.E.S.P.E.C.T Program Coordinator: My name’s Craig Taunton, and I’m the coordinator of the R.E.S.P.E.C.T Program, run by BYDS. The first time we ever ran the project was in 2013.
Tim Carroll, the director of BYDS, had contacted me about running an arts project. He had funding to do a couple of days a week, working with young boys in the area, engaging them with arts. So I came in and met with Tim, and we had the idea about doing some kind of performance, music-based hip-hop.
Tim mentioned to me that BYDS had always been very passionate about White Ribbon, and they done a lot of stuff around White Ribbon Day and worked with boys. So I just thought that I loved the idea, and I said, that’s perfect, and they wrote the song. They performed it on White Ribbon Day, and I think on the day of that performance, both the school and BYDS recognized that this was something special and shouldn’t just be a one off.
Tim Carroll – Director of BYDS: My name is Tim Carroll. I’m the Director of BYDS or Bankstown Youth Development Service. Quite a lot of the projects that we have explored or used arts processes for, relative issues pertaining to violence.
We try to do work that is evidence-based. All of the evidence suggests that the older you get, the more fixed and cemented your attitudes become, and that the greatest likelihood of effecting those attitudes in a positive way is when you’re younger.
Craig: I’ve been talking to the boys about how important it is to be respectful of women and relationships should be equal, decisions made together, that the boy is not in charge or not the boss. Because we use music and hip-hop and performance, they want to be part of it. I’ve had teachers say they can’t wait for you guys to come back next week. They’re really looking forward to it.
Tim: Let the children learn in an age-appropriate way about how these things work, and our whole credo is that we live in a society where people are treated unequally because they happen to be born a particular gender, and we’re just saying that’s not the way that a good society operates.
Craig, to group of students: The only way you’re going to get there is by trying. So come out here, I know you get nervous, but come out here and try your best and just go for it.
Student rapping: All these women are meant to live in peace. All this violence has to cease. Too many women are being attacked. One in three, to be exact. I’ll wear this ribbon. ‘Cause I am proud to say no to violence out loud.
Young people empowering young people
YFS is a not-for-profit organisation that runs the R4Respect program. R4Respect engages young people to help tackle the problem of violence against women in the community. It empowers youth ambassadors to visit schools and educate young people about respectful relationships.
Beenush – YFS Coordinator: YFS is a community organisation in Logan. It’s been around for about 30 years and since then, we are here in the community, and what we really found is that there’s a lot of domestic violence and the best way to combat it, is by using young people to empower other young people to prevent violence.
YFS has been really instrumental in starting the R4Respect Programme, because it’s the first programme of it’s kind, that really uses young people to tackle a problem in the community.
The R4Respect was started by YFS about three years ago, and what they aimed to do, was, getting young youth ambassadors from the community and empower them to speak up against violence in their own communities, and so, all the youth ambassadors get together and we go out to schools, and we talk to other young people and educate them on messages about healthy relationships.
R4Respect uses about twelve youth ambassadors in the programme, who are all from Logan, and the point of that is, that they all can create change in their own communities, their university communities, and it’s been really successful, in that the young people are able to have a network of people creating change together.
So, community leaders have a really key role, and that of all is, believing in young people, and believing that young people can create change. So, by empowering the young people in our community, we’re all able to create change in our own space.
Rachel – YFS Youth Ambassador to students: I’m Rachel, this is Nadia, and this is Ryan. So, we’re all teammates, and we’re all really passionate about what we do.
Ryan – YFS Youth Ambassador: It’s really important to get in early and stop domestic violence from happening, rather than picking up the pieces afterwards.
Rachel: I guess really scary is, these stats, they’re reflective of real kids in Australia, but what we’re saying is, that’s not the end of it. You guys are, we can empower you guys to make a change. You guys literally have the power to change these stats up on the board.
Letting your partner, or your friend, or whoever it is, aware of your boundaries, ’cause everyone has a right to privacy and boundaries, whether you’re in a relationship or not, you deserve to feel safe, and you deserve to have your own personal space to do your own things.
Beenush Probably the most amazing thing for all of us to see, when we present workshops, is, to see the kids at the start of the workshop, and then at the end, with completely different attitudes about consent and respect.
Nadia – YFS Youth Ambassador: I personally love when I get to see the students interact amongst their peers in the line activity, in other activities that we do, and they’re sort of, amongst their own peer groups, talk about how they feel, what their decision is on the question.
But also, at the end of a session, you often have a lot of students that come up to you afterwards, and go, hey Miss, that was really great. Thank you so much.
Ryan: I’m really proud to be a part of this. I come to work, and I feel, like, I’ve actually made a difference to someone’s life, and I’m working towards the kind of change that we need to see in the world.
Special thanks to YFS
If you want to know more about YFS and the R4Respect program, please visit yfs.org.au
Violence against women, let’s stop it at the start.
Learning to lead
The I Respect program in Canberra teaches influencers of young people – such as coaches, teachers, employers and other community role models – about how they can encourage respectful attitudes and behaviours in the next generation.
Mark Wadie – Founder, I Respect initiative: I’m Mark Wadie, I’m the founding director of the I Respect Initiative, and it’s been a 10-year journey of building it, coming from working with men and boys and helping them take the mask off and really share what’s going on but also take responsibility in their lives. Which has led to me then, sort of, developing evidence-based programmes essentially come down to bystander intervention, where I train people of influence, whether it be in companies, schools, sports teams, or out in workplaces that they can be leaders of the I Respect Initiative by bringing people in, and getting them to be inspired and motivated to be upstanders. Things like respect, integrity, and more importantly, nonviolence. And having discussions about issues that we are facing and say, hey, what can we do about this?
Mark Wadie to group of influencers: Because we’ve got here today moving forward, I just wanted to share how this program’s has had an impact on you and the nice people around you just to share your experience with so we can learn and we can all learn together.
Harry Kelly – Girls basketball coach: For the second topic of this one, which is challenging gender stereotypes, I got my mum to come in and speak to the girls, because my mum has the direct experience of challenging gender stereotypes and then we’d talk to them, and show them that it’s possible.
Peter Bradley – Board member, Turner Rugby Union Club: We’ve got to get off our backsides and do something instead of, words can be empty, if you don’t have action.
Steve Mason – Business owner: It’s more important to make people feel like they’re valued. I’ve met a really diverse, sort of a group of people that I work with, you know? A lot of my bakers are older guys, more traditional sort of old fashioned kind of men. And my front counter staff are predominantly young ladies, from 15 to 21.
There’s been a process of education with those guys, but there’s also been a process of reassurance and a process of empowering and just reassuring these girls that they are well within their rights to speak the way they speak, and to ask for what they ask for, that they deserve their respect.
Peter: I think Mark’s shown me that it’s good for people to be aware that they do have support at their end, that they should let them know. The Australian community, it’s there for us to put into, and not to sit back and hope that someone else is going to do it.
Harry: Rather than waiting for them to face those issues and deal with it, probably in a way that’s not healthy, we actually equip them with the tool now to say, I know about this, and now I know how to deal with it.
Jose Martinez – Anglicare worker: I work with Young Carers, so at school, I reach out to Youth Workers, we put together small groups of eight, and we just run the I Respect through it, and the idea is for, one, for them to get awareness, and B, just for them to just influence others as well.
Andrew Hill – Anglicare worker: It’s always an honour and a privilege to be an influence in anybody’s life. But I think one of the interesting things about Youth Work – it’s not that we’re in front of young people calling them towards us, and we’re not behind just shouting, this is the way to go, we’re actually walking step by step along with young people. It’s starting the journey of asking questions. Why do I believe certain things, why do I do certain things, why do I see through this lens towards women, towards society? And as they ask those questions with their life, the changes might happen years into the future, but at least I can be a part of starting that process.
What role do teachers play in influencing young people around respectful relationships? At Santa Maria College in Perth, teachers play an active role in educating students about healthy relationships through interactive sessions and open discussions.
Sarah Ditchburn – Health and Physical Education teacher: My name is Sarah Ditchburn, and I’m a health and physical education teacher at Santa Marie college. For the child protection curriculum is mandated across Australia. And you teach it from pre-K to year 12. And this is our first year implementing it at Santa Maria.
Simone Sawiris – Deputy Principal: The mandate came initially from the government and then the Catholic education office. They made it more an alignment with the Catholic teachings, and it’s important for all schools and for all students.
Our young women of the future – it’s really important that they have a voice. And also that they know how to be empowered and what to do. And while they may or may not be victims of abuse in the future, they will be able to recognize it now, which I think is a really powerful thing.
Anita Skelton – Head of Physical Education: We were given time as a department to plan out how we would roll out this curriculum. There are different topics that you are required to cover in each year group.
Jane Carmignani – School Psychologist: So I thought that was really well for the girls to say okay, yes what’s our current understanding of domestic violence, family violence, and how can we expand that to really teach them about other things that might be also in that category that they wouldn’t naturally assume we talked about. How it can be emotional, how it can be social, how it can be financial. And it might not be something that you recognize.
April – student: I really like doing all these open discussions so everyone could put in their experiences and their thoughts.
Jane: We started off by just talking about normal relationships, and we talked about what’s healthy relationships in a family versus unhealthy. I think it just gives them a good comparison, and it makes it more relevant rather than just coming in and saying well, you know, this is all about domestic violence it doesn’t give them a framework within their own world to apply that.
Simone – It’s really important to start those conversations and get the girls talking and thinking about it now. Because then, by the time they get to a point where they’re having a relationship in the future, they will then know how they feel about this, and what they could do to make sure it doesn’t happen to them.
Jane: The impact will be more amplified if it was giving that message to parents. I actually think that would be, you know, a good kind of aspect to add to the program, obviously this is the first time that we’re doing it, but yeah I think that would be useful. Hopefully the girls go home and talk to their parents about it. I’m sure some do.
Sarah: I think it’s really important from a young age that the students know how to recognize what is healthy and what is unhealthy in a relationship. And sometimes, you know, growing up with boys or, you know, families that they haven’t seen what a healthy relationship is.
It’s really important that they learn from teachers that, you know, this is right and this is wrong, and you shouldn’t accept this and you know, respect is really important when it comes to any type of close relationship that they have.
Anita: The education teachers, I feel we have a crucial role in being able to inform the students about these really important topics, and empower them to act on something if it doesn’t feel quite right.
Sarah: It’s been really great, some feedback from students that we’ve been able to create an open space where students feel their comfortable to come and speak to us as a trusted network.
The Shared Culture of Respect
The Australian Migrant Resource Centre in South Australia provides a range of services for people new to Australia, including information sessions around preventing violence against women and where to seek support. The Centre helps new arrivals settle in to their new communities, and encourages them to talk about respectful relationships with the young people in their life.
Cynthia Caird – Community services manager, to a group of workshop participants: You know we don’t have an extended family here, many of us don’t have extended family. That’s why the services are made available to people with experiencing problems, including domestic violence.
Cynthia: I’m Cynthia Caird, I’m the Community Services Manager for the Australian Migrant Resource Center. I manage a number of programs, and that includes the capacity building of communities who are new to the country.
Dawaud Sharify – Case worker: We do have program information stations for any arrivals to sort of educate them about domestic violence and when it’s against children, women, so, in general.
Cynthia: When working with new communities, you just need to gain their trust and ensure that you address issues that they bring up.
Cynthia, to workshop participants: I know it’s very hard, this is very difficult, people are afraid to bring it up, you know, because of various reasons. But it is better that we have awareness in the community. You have awareness, and then you can pass that awareness to your own people.
Divya Devarajan –workshop participant: I’ll educate my kids that violence is not the exact right way to deal with things, whether we have, you know, we have to respect each other.
Cynthia, to workshop participants: It is not an excuse like culture, like, people say, “oh, it’s part of our culture.” No, culture shouldn’t be as an excuse for domestic and family violence. And also set a good example for your children. You need to respect everyone in the family, particularly the wife.
Jyotshna Karki –workshop participant: So when we talk about the ethnic groups, that’s big, where culture and values start, and so when we talk one-on-one, we give them the information and we refer them to different community leaders.
Hiba Alwani – workshop participant: So much that I knew about domestic violence before, but there was a lot of things I didn’t know. And now I can pass it on to young ladies and families, how to look out for those signs, and what are the different types.
Sara Al-Kufish –workshop participant: Is really important, because some people feel like it’s bad behavior, but it’s okay, or it’s the way the person is, ’cause they don’t recognize it’s actually emotional
Cynthia: It is actually small steps for communities to be able to understand, and their concept about domestic violence is quite new.
Dawaud: ‘Cause we do get feedback from the clients that, you know, they come in and say, look, ever since I came in here, and the information we receive from AMRC is just, it’s life-changing, and now we actually think differently and we act differently.
Sheikh Anjuman Moliviatis – workshop participant: To live in a safe and a happy environment, we need to respect, and tolerance, that’s a must.
Broken Hill Sparks Change
The first Stop it at the Start community workshop was held in Broken Hill in late 2018. Community members such as the local Mayor, teachers, coaches, business leaders, religious leaders and other local role models came together to discuss how we can all play a role in preventing disrespect and violence against women.
The workshop helped attendees brainstorm ways to bring Stop it at the Start to life in their area, to drive a positive change for the future of their community.
Darriea Turley – Mayor of Broken Hill to workshop participants: To see a program step away from traditionally what we do about domestic violence, and what we traditionally do about domestic violence is we target the women, we target the after event, we look at the finding of what could happen then, as opposed to how we could prevent it now. And if we look at what we can prevent now, it certainly will make a change to the future.
Darriea: Little things that are said that really impact on people’s, the way they are, their imprint in life, the way they grow in life and their beliefs in themselves and their own values. And if we don’t change that, if we don’t actually have a process at thinking about what is fair and equitable, what is consciously going to impact on people and what are we allowing as parents in that process?
Stefan Delatovic – Workshop facilitator: And today we really want to talk about, like, activities and actions that we can do as a community. We are looking to affect the attitudes of our children aged 10 to 17 for this campaign.
Leanne Barber – Corrections Officer: If we meet once a month, every Tuesday… It’s just one of my passions at the moment. I’ve got two little step-grandchildren, they tell me little things that happen at school about disrespect and bullying, so I just want to be able to influence them a bit more and make, be a bit more positive role model for them.
Lori Emmett – YMA Board member: Part of what we do is provide a safe space where the girls can be themselves. This is part of what we do already and continuing it on and just sort of seeing all the little fine aspects of it, I think is really good, it’s great.
Stefan: This is societal issue with a lot of different facets and we have to pick somewhere to start.
Susan Thomas – Community leader: Perhaps look at our sporting events and make it mandatory to talk about respect at children’s events, not just once at each event, but ongoing.
Branko Licul – Council representative: The team having a chat. If these sort of short talks would occur at every sporting ground with the teams, you’ve got a captive audience with the kids there. It doesn’t have to be full on, formal. Informal, but it’s consistent, repeated message and you could also maybe get some feedback from the kids themselves as well.
Cathy Dyer – Community leader: All those little A-frame signs that I pass whenever I go into the basketball stadiums in Adelaide, that say this is a sport, these people are volunteers, you need to be appropriate and respectful in whatever you do inside this event. You walk past it every single time you go in.
Cathy, to workshop group: There’s a reasonable amount of awareness raising activities in Broken Hill.
Lori, to workshop group: He’s gotten in trouble for something that sounds really simple and really nothing, so he’s commiserating with his boy, but then he’s got to realize that this can affect his girl.
Branko: You start thinking about how words can hurt and how the socialization of children can have a big impact on their later years.
Leanne: I also learned a lot about how to formulate and get people interested and start talking about respect.
Cathy: Something that you should automatically know what it is that people are talking about, but when you delve down into how that might play out in a community, there’s lots of different ways you can do it.
Susan: It’s really important to be having conversations about respect with young people, but it’s not just young people. I think a lot of the respect is actually learned just by the environment that we’re walking through, the streets that we’re walking through.