Chanel Contos hopes new curriculum will kill rape culture

Chanel Contos hopes the new curriculum will end a ‘rape culture’ in Australian schools.

Chanel Contos, on sabbatical in London, has praised the inclusion of lessons on respectful relationships in the national school curriculum. Picture: Ella Pellegrini

Chanel Contos, the former private schoolgirl who sparked a ­national conversation about teenage sex, hopes the teaching of sexual consent in classroom will end a “rape culture’’ in schools.

The 24-year-old founder of the Teach Us Consent movement, who gathered 45,000 signatures on a petition to teach students about respectful relationships, warned teenagers are learning about sex through online porn, which often is violent and degrading to women.

“If we want to ensure that our children come to us if they ever experience sexual violence, and don’t have shame around telling loved ones this information, then we need to teach about respectful relationships and consent laws, and empower them to be able to negotiate consent,’’ Ms Contos said from London. “This means both teaching them how to say no, and how to accept a no.

“If we want to ensure students don’t unconsciously perpetrate sexual assault, we need to explicitly teach them about respectful relationships, consent laws, and navigating consent.

“The reality is that currently Australian students’ sex education is mainly coming from pornography. This is dangerous.’’

Ms Contos said letting children learn about sex by watching porn was as dangerous as letting “all L and P platers learn to drive by watching Formula 1’’.

The new national curriculum, published on Monday, introduces the concept and legal definition of sexual consent into the physical education curriculum. Teenagers as young as 14 will learn about the laws relating to seeking, giving and refusing consent to sex.

To “enhance the safety and wellbeing of sexual partners’’, students in years 9 and 10 will learn how to communicate feelings, respect boundaries and choices and gain affirmative consent.

High school students will be taught that they cannot give sexual consent when drunk or affected by drugs, or if “there is an imbalance of power or coercion”.

Classes will discuss how the portrayal of sexual relationships in pornography, TV shows, movies and music “may influence people’s beliefs about respectful, safe and consensual relationships’’.

Ms Contos, a former student of the elite Kambala girls’ school in Sydney, has revealed she was sexually assaulted at the age of 13.

Last year, while studying her Masters degree in gender, education and international development at University College Lon­don, she posted an ­Instagram poll asking girls in Sydney if they had been assaulted by a schoolboy.

More than 6500 young women wrote to her with distressing accounts of how they were raped when drunk or unconscious, forced to perform oral sex, or filmed without consent.

A year later, Ms Contos was ­invited to meet Scott Morrison, who agreed to incorporate lessons on respectful relationships in the national school curriculum.

Now on a sabbatical in London, she will take up a role at The Australia Institute, launching a centre focusing on gender and sex equality in Canberra.

She recently gave the keynote address at a conference with the heads of every independent school in the UK.

“The Teach Us Consent campaign spurred a British girl to do the same thing over here, called Everyone’s Invited – it’s been super successful in revealing rape culture in UK schools,’’ she said.