‘A voice to the voiceless’: Queensland’s Australian of the Year on saving lives

Queensland Australian of the Year Rachel Downie mortgaged her home to get her anti-bullying idea off the ground. Now, the digital platform she developed has saved countless lives, leading to her becoming the Queensland Australian of the Year. This is her story.

Sunshine Coast educator Rachel Downie was more than 14,000 kilometres from home when she found out she had been named this year’s Queensland Australian of the Year.

In the early hours of the morning from a Chicago hotel room, Downie watched on as her wife Amanda accepted the prestigious award on her behalf.

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It was an emotional moment, she recalls.

A recognition for her incredible work founding and developing Stymie, a notification system which allows school students to anonymously report everything from bullying and family violence, to depression and self-harm.

Fittingly, Downie was not in the US city on holiday, but was attending the International Bullying Prevention Association conference.

She says her initial reaction was to feel shocked, along with feelings of being “comparatively unworthy”.

“And then I reflect on how hard I have worked and the number of lives that we have saved and changed, and I feel tearily humbled and so very grateful,” she says.

“Every day I am contacted by a school telling me how Stymie has significantly changed the direction of a young person’s life and I am driven to work even harder to let everyone know that they are loved, and that they matter, and that they are a significant part of this world continuing to turn.

“I spent so many of my formative years experiencing support deficit, that it took me a while to realise my strength needed to blossom from within.”

It was those formative years that ultimately led Downie into her 25-year career in education.

Growing up she attended more than a dozen schools across four states, all the while dealing with a number of traumatic family issues.

“My parents had an on-again, off-again relationship, complicated even further by alcoholism, drug abuse and mental health issues, which meant we moved a lot,” she said.

“I was a weird one, I didn’t fit in because I was always the ‘new kid’.”

Her best friend was the library, along with her sisters – “wonderful women”, she says.

Queensland Australian of the Year 2020 Rachel Downie is a passionate advocate for children. Photo: Lisa Seaton

CALL OF EDUCATION

A bright student in spite of her circumstances, a career in education may not have seemed like the obvious choice for someone whose own schooling life had been so unsettled.

But she says teaching allowed her “be there for young people in a way that few adults had been there for me in my life”.

And so she was, working initially as an art teacher and then later in various leadership positions including as a Deputy Principal and Head of Faculty.

But the life-changing event which sparked Ms Downie to ultimately create Stymie is a story of the most heartbreaking kind.

A number of years ago one of her students, a Year 9 boy, took his own life – details of exactly when and which school she keeps close to her chest, for the family’s privacy.

Sadly, this was not the first time one her students had committed suicide.

“But it was the first time where I felt like it was preventable, that the information that some of the other students came forward with afterwards, was lifesaving information,” she says.

The young boy was experiencing family violence, was being bullied at school and had been told to kill himself “as a joke”.

“I honestly believe that if we, as staff, knew what he was going through, we could have helped him,” she says.

“So I started investigating, interviewing, asking kids, educators and parents what they thought we could do to stop something like this happening again.”

The experience drove Downie to develop an anonymous way of students, often afraid or hesitant to speak up, to relay messages to their schools.

She and Amanda mortgaged their home to get the idea off the ground, with Downie working shifts waitressing at a Chinese restaurant in the evenings after full days at school for extra cash.

Amanda Downie accepts wife Rachel Downie's 2020 Queensland Australian of the Year Award.

HARD WORK STYMIED

Despite the efforts, Stymie was almost over before it began when the company hired to curate the website and code failed to deliver, causing them to start all over again.

But the very first school to sign up had been experiencing issues with older boys harassing younger girls – something the principal had tried unsuccessfully to get fearful students to talk about.

“Within six days of having Stymie, the school was able to bring criminal charges against several of the boys,” Downie says.

“When I first started Stymie it was focused on bullying, but the students began to realise with the anonymous function they could report anything, and it has really grown from there.

“Schools have told me even if they only get one notification a year, then it’s absolutely worth it.”

The numbers surrounding Stymie, which also operates in New Zealand and the UAE, are incredible.

Downie has spoken face-to-face with more than 300,000 students across the country over the past five years, racked up more than 150,000 kilometres in the car, and last year Stymie sent more than 40,000 notifications to schools. Some days, a notification is reaching a school every four minutes.

The immeasurable number is the children who are alive today because they, or someone close to them, used it to reach out.

“I think that every single one of us has been in a situation at school where we were too frightened to say something about what we saw, or what we experienced,” she says.

“Stymie starts a conversation and the stories that we have heard from schools about what they have discovered after implementing it is both heartbreaking and inspiring.”

Rachel Downie’s Stymie has helped change the lives of countless children in the five years since it was launched. Photo: iStock

A LITTLE HUMAN TOUCH

When Stymie is launched in a school one of Downie’s non-negotiables is a launch day where she speaks to students in ever year level, and holds sessions with staff and parents.

“We do this to humanise the Stymie technology, talk about empathy and kindness and the consequences of bystanding behaviours,” she says.

“I’m 50 soon, and I grew up in a world where children were always wrong, where you weren't really allowed to express yourself and adults were well and truly ‘the boss’.

“I thought a lot about the fact that when I was child, I’d often had a really big day with so much family stuff to deal with, before I had even made it to school.

“If I had cyber-bullying on top of what I had to deal with, I’m not sure I would have had the resilience to get through it.”

Perhaps somewhat surprisingly, one of her goals for the next decade is for Stymie to no longer need to exist.

“If I can empower kids in schools to actually stand up for each other in person and not have to use an anonymous notification system to report harm, mission accomplished,” she says.

For now she wants to use her platform to spread her message far and wide – to “be the kind of person who leaves a mark, not a scar”.

“If all of us could do that, if we could step out of our comfort zone and do one act of kindness, then we could all effect change,” she says.