Royal commission into domestic and sexual violence calls for new way of teaching teens about healthy relationships
Social media influencers are ‘openly encouraging’ dangerous sexual violence like choking and painting it as mainstream, with calls for our schools to tackle the issue in the classroom.
Social media influencers are “openly encouraging” young people into acts of domestic and sexual violence and a new national school curriculum is needed to fight back.
A landmark royal commission has also warned that the “scale” of misogynist content online is “undermining” efforts to educate teenagers about healthy relationships and acts like strangulation during sex are now being accepted as “mainstream”.
Royal commissioner Natasha Stott Despoja, who delivered her final report this week, is urging the state and federal governments to develop a nationally consistent curriculum for relationships and sexuality education, designed with input from young people.
She has also suggested:
SCHOOLS be required to report to authorities how many students are given exemptions from taking part in such lessons.
GOVERNMENT designs a new website with “reliable” and “up to date” information for young people, to replace current “unclear and inconsistent” advice “scattered across multiple websites”.
THE eSafety commissioner receive more funding to crackdown on “influencer content openly encouraging acts of domestic, family and sexual violence”.
This includes content from “incel” – or involuntary celibate – culture and the so-called “manosphere”, or online discussions dominated by misognogy, disrespect of women and opposition to gender equality.
“In these spaces, harmful content is not just consumed, it is amplified and normalised,” Ms Stott Despoja wrote in her almost 700-page report.
She warned current efforts to teach school students about respectful relationships “are being undermined by the scale, speed and influence of online platforms, where violent, misogynistic and anti-equality content circulates unchecked”.
Ms Stott Despoja’s year-long inquiry took in research that found violent sexual acts are becoming more common among young Australians, and strangulation is seen as a “mainstream sexual behaviour”.
A 2024 survey of 4700 young adults, by researchers at the University of Melbourne and the University of Queensland, found 57 per cent had been strangled during sexual activity.
More than a third first learned about choking during sex by watching pornography.
Separate research, cited in the royal commission, found content produced by influencers like Andrew Tate “is a central way in which some young men are shaping their identity as men online”.
Tate is a self-proclaimed misogynist who, along with his brother Tristan, has been charged with rape and human trafficking.
That research, by Deakin University and Queensland University of Technology researchers, found young men often encounter pornography online “without actively seeking it out”.
Child protection expert and SA Australian of the Year Professor Leah Bromfield told the royal commission that authorities must “go further to regulate big tech to actually create more safety within the virtual world”.
“There is so much technology … that would enable them to implement age verification … identify child sexual exploitation material … identify violent pornography,” she said.
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Originally published as Royal commission into domestic and sexual violence calls for new way of teaching teens about healthy relationships
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