Listen Up: Understanding young people’s experiences of family and gender-based violence

This event is a highlight on our calendar as it is a wonderful opportunity for the team to meet and greet with students and teachers alike and discuss all things prevention and gender and social equality.

CNV hosted an interactive activity inviting students aged 15-18 to consider what they regard as ‘green flag’ or ‘red flag’ behaviour in relationships. Students were asked to consider a diverse range of relationships including but not limited to:

• Romantic
• Family (including parents, grandparents, siblings etc)
• Family-like, family of choice
• Kin
• Friends
• Carers/Guardians

CNV staff were blown away by the response: with over 50 student contributions to our activity and numerous, diverse conversations with many more young people and teachers alike, we were able to connect their understandings of respectful relationships with broader concepts around gender equality and drivers of violence.

The themes that consistently showed up included:

• Importance of feeling seen, heard and recognised as their own person
• Importance of setting and respecting boundaries
• Importance of clear communication – (a crucial principle in D&I to ensure everyone feels respect, heard and understood)

These incredible insights sit against a backdrop where young people are increasingly exposed to a disturbing rise in the normalisation of misogynist attitudes and behaviours.  While misogyny has always been present – the rise of accessibility to misogynistic influencers, such as Andrew Tate – is changing the landscape, particularly for young people.

The rise in tech-facilitated abuse, online grooming and exposure has meant that children and young people are increasingly exposed to violent and harmful online content, including messaging which reinforces rigid stereotypes and gender roles.[1] The expectation then put on young boys and men to hold and adhere to performative heteronormative and toxic presentations of masculinity has been having devastating social and relationship impacts, particularly within schools.

Researchers are reporting disturbingly high increases in sexist, misogynistic behaviours amongst teen boys, with female students reporting in large numbers that they are increasingly and rapidly feeling unsafe at school. Equally, teachers across the state are noticing that female students are quieter in classrooms and no longer speaking up as they used to.[2] The change is visible. And it’s not just contained to the classroom.

According to Hayley Boxall a criminologist at the Australian National University, ‘[s]ervice providers are getting younger referrals and seeing a disturbing rise in peer-on-peer sexual violence’.[3]

Capturing the voices and experiences of young people is critical in deepening our understanding and informing our prevention and response approaches. As service providers working in prevention and response, it is more important than ever before that we listen up to better understand young people’s experiences of and understandings of family and gendered violence and importantly how critical respect is in ending violence.

It was an immense privilege to hear from the students at BSSC and see firsthand their commitment to raising the profile of respectful relationships.

[1] Over H, Bunce C, Baggaley J, Zendle D. ‘Understanding the influence of online misogyny in schools from the perspective of teachers’, in PLOSone, Vol.20(2):e0299339. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0299339. Available from: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11864523/ [Accessed: 25 November 2025]

[2] Victorian Women’s Trust 2024. ‘Malevolent Influence: Schools and the Shadow of Andrew Tate’, webinar, 1 May.

[3] Perez L 2025. ‘Teen boys, misogyny, and violence – could Adolescence be Australia’s wake-up call?, article in, ANU Reporter, 24 April. Available from: https://cass.anu.edu.au/news/teen-boys-misogyny-and-violence-could-adolescence-be-australias-wake-call [accessed: 24 November 2025]