Push to teach consent catches on in Australia
LONDON — Not long ago, Chanel Contos was living the life of a typical graduate student, albeit a pandemic one: sleeping in late and attending online classes while enduring months of lockdown in her East London apartment.
But a petition she began that calls for schools in Australia, her home country, to reform their education about consensual sex — created after she and her close friends began revisiting painful experiences of sexual assault they had suffered as students — changed that.
Suddenly, Contos was compiling thousands of survivor testimonies, fielding calls from journalists and briefing lawmakers on the pervasiveness of sexual assault.
“It’s something that happens every single day, and no one talks about it; and it happens to children, and it happens to teenagers,” she said of sexual assault. “Maybe the same boys who sexually assault people as teenagers take advantage of people in the workplace when they’re in powerful positions.”
Now Contos has the goal of achieving a significant policy change in Australia: making consent education mandatory in the national curriculum, which is undergoing a review.
Students are not given the skills to navigate intimate relationships early enough, Contos argues, and she believes this omission is partly to blame for the pervasiveness of sexual harassment and assault among teenagers.
She is part of a wave of young campaigners who are helping advance the #MeToo movement in Australia, where it got off to a slow start.
Her new organization, Teach Us Consent, advocates that children learn about consent — not in a sexual context — as soon as they start school. As they mature, it calls for topics like sexual coercion and digital harassment to be addressed by the time they reach high school.
To opponents who say such education could encourage students to have sex earlier, Contos has a blunt reply: “Abstinence is a choice, and sexual consent is not.”
During a year in which allegations of rape and sexual harassment have reached the upper levels of Australia’s government, her push for earlier consent education is garnering widespread attention.
In March, weeks after her petition first went viral — it now has more than 44,000 signatures — reports of sexual assault to police in New South Wales, Australia’s most populous state, surged by 61%. The state of Victoria has announced that it will make consent education mandatory from an early age, and in July, Queensland state said education on sexual consent would both start earlier and be more explicit.
The Australian media has turned to Contos, 23, to discuss consent education, and in the span of only a few months, her name has become almost synonymous with her cause; Prime Minister Scott Morrison has promised her a meeting. And she has taken on the unexpected role of spokesperson for a national movement more than 10,000 miles from home.
She moved to London from Sydney during the pandemic to study for a master’s degree in gender education and international development at University College London. A child of Greek immigrants, Contos grew up in an affluent beachside neighborhood of Sydney and attended a private school for girls, whose social scene included students at neighboring schools for boys.
At 13, she was sexually assaulted, she said, by a boy who she later discovered — to her horror — had subsequently done the same to a friend. Initially, she blamed herself for not reporting him, but the lack of accountability for such violations soon angered her.
“If he had been taught respect, he wouldn’t have done it in the first place,” she said.
In early 2021, she began appealing on social media for testimonies from private school students in Sydney, thinking a handful would help her petition schools to reform education on consent.
Ultimately, more than 6,500 anonymous women and girls from around Australia wrote in.