What Were You Wearing?’s Fight for Mandatory DFSV Education

In 2024, the Australian Institute of Family Studies found over half of young Australians aged 16 to 19 have experienced sexual harassment, yet Victorian students in years 10 to 12 do not undertake mandatory domestic, family and sexual violence (DFSV) education. Today, What Were You Wearing? (WWYW?) is fighting to change that. 

The Australian charity dedicated to ending DFSV is starting a new national campaign focusing on DFSV education for young people, with a Victorian petition calling to implement mandatory DFSV education for year 10 to 12 students.

This petition needs 10,000 signatures to be presented to the State Government’s Legislative Council, and will stop accepting signatures on January 13, 2027.

WWYW? member and leader of this campaign, Abbey Hardie spoke to Farrago about why young Australians need this amendment to their education.

“The Australian curriculum mandates what is taught within schools, but doesn’t determine the frequency [or availability of the education]. [Sex education] is often not intersectional and often doesn’t engage topics such as emotional abuse, coercive control, online abuse, or [how to seek health advice],” Hardie said. 

The campaign aims to prevent cycles of violence and victim-blaming culture, by tackling Australia's current DFSV crisis through education and prevention, with the goal of teaching young people how to recognise violent behaviours and understand why these actions aren’t acceptable.

“There are education of things like reproduction, healthy and respectful relationships. But there are currently no educational frameworks… that delve into topics such as consent and different forms of abuse that are just beyond physical.”

The most recent (2021-2022) Personal Safety survey conducted by the Australian Bureau of Statistics reported that 1 in 6 women and 1 in 9 men have experienced childhood abuse. 

This is why a key aspect of this campaign is teaching students how to identify and report DFSV and other inappropriate behaviours that challenge their safety. The need for young people to acquire this skill is becoming increasingly vital as new technology-facilitated threats such as sextortion are emerging.

In 2025, eSafety received more than 3,300 reports of sextortion, which is a form of online blackmail where the victim is coerced into sending sexual images of themselves, and are then threatened to comply with the offender's demands to prevent these images from being shared. Sextortionists are using artificial intelligence to create fake, “attractive” online identities, and are targeting Australian teenage boys, with 42 per cent of these reports coming from males aged 18 to 24.

“Students are often reporting that they think that the… education they are receiving is not as relevant and comprehensive as they would like,” Hardie said. 

The issue with sex education in Victorian high schools isn’t that it doesn’t exist, but more so that it can lack diversity, consistency and relevancy. 

What Were You Wearing?’s DFSV petition is being sponsored by Greens MP for Northern Metro, Anasina Gray-Barberio, who told Farrago why she is backing this campaign.

“It’s so important that as a parliamentarian, I do everything in my power to bring this issue to Parliament to let the government know that this is an area where we can make change in our high schools to protect young women, and also educate our young men,” Gray-Barberio said. 

If this petition manages to collect 10,000 signatures, Gray-Barberio will present the petition to the upper house of parliament, opening a debate to decide whether the government will consider the recommendations of the document.

At the time of publishing this article, Sherele Moody’s Australian Femicide Watch had reported 45 women had been killed. 

“It’s a political choice for governments [not to act on femicide] because they want to prioritise investment. [DFSV] is not anything new for our communities,” Gray-Barberio stated. 

“Call your local MP, email your local MP, and ask them: What are you doing about the epidemic of family violence in this state and in this country?, Why aren’t you speaking up about it?.”

Intimate Partner Violence in Adolescent Relationships 

A 2023 Australian Institute of Family Studies study found that three in ten 18 to 19 year olds (nearly 30 per cent) have experienced intimate partner violence in the year leading up to the national study. Intimate partner violence, in this study, is specifically defined as physical, sexual or psychological violence within a current or previous sexual or romantic relationship.

More recent research conducted by LaTrobe University between October 2024 and April 2025 found Australian teens are still experiencing high rates of intimate partner violence. 

More than half of the 4400 young Australians aged 14 to 18 surveyed had reported being in a relationship for more than three months. 44 per cent of this group had experienced verbal abuse within a relationship, 37 per cent felt frightened of an intimate partner, and 31 per cent had experienced technology-facilitated harassment or tracking by a partner. 

18 per cent of this group had experienced physical violence by a partner, consisting of being hit, pushed, or grabbed. 

Young women were more likely than young men to be subjected to violence, harassment or fear within a relationship. 

In terms of consent, more than one in five of those surveyed said they had experienced unwanted sex. Of this 21 per cent, some had agreed to sex to avoid upsetting their partner (63 per cent), had agreed after they had initially said no because someone kept asking (56 per cent), were too intoxicated to consent (30 per cent), or were physically forced to have sex (28 per cent). 

Deputy Director of the Australian Research Centre in Sex, Health and Society, and the lead investigator on this survey, Professor Jennifer Power spoke to Farrago about her team’s findings.

“There’s less attention on sexual violence and intimate partner violence among young adolescents,” Professor Power said.

“[High rates of intimate partner violence amongst young people] is consistent with high rates of sexual violence among the whole population.” 

Professor Power also detailed how sex education in Australia is of a low standard, leaving gaps in young people’s knowledge on sex and their bodies. This leads to young people searching for alternative sources, as conversations with their educators and parents are generally lacking depth.

“A lot of young people go and look at pornography because they’re curious about sex. People reach an age where they want to see what sex looks like… and online pornography is so accessible now that’s where people go,” Professor Power said.

“There’s a sort of combination of the accessibility of pornography, the curiosity factor, and just the absence of other good sex education.” 

This can be problematic when easily-accessible online pornography can consist of violent and misogynistic content. According to Archives of Sexual Behaviour, 45 per cent of Pornhub and 35 per cent of Xvideos scenes include at least one act of physical aggression, and women are the targets of this aggression 97 per cent of the time. 

Moreover, Professor Power detailed how her findings also concluded that young people aren’t always aware of the sexual health resources they have access to. This includes not knowing how to access a sexual health clinic or how to use their Medicare card to pay for one without their parents seeing the transaction on their medical records. 

The Existing Respectful Relationships Initiative 

The Respectful Relationships program is a Victorian Government initiative that currently delivers mandatory relationship and consent education for students from prep to year 12. 

“Implementing a whole-school approach to Respectful Relationships was a recommendation of Victoria’s Royal Commission into Family Violence and helps build a culture of respect and gender equality in our schools,” the Department of Education told Farrago.

This royal commission also found that a sustained effort to teach relationships and sexuality education (RSE) is compulsory to achieve the generational behavioural change needed.

The Victorian Government has invested $129 million since 2016 into the Respectful Relationships initiative, which is implemented within over 2,000 government, Catholic and independent schools. 

This education is designed to focus on gender equality, mutual respect, consent education, and is entirely separate to sex education within the curriculum. The program aims to combat gender-based violence, discrimination and harassment.

“The government’s invested quite a bit in consent education, which is great. However, the curriculum is very loose, so schools don’t necessarily have to implement or achieve any kind of objectives,” Professor Power said. 

Moreover, most sex education does end in year 10, leaving year 11, 12, and tertiary education students to miss out on important elements of DFSV and general sex education. Crucially, these are the life stages when most young people start to have sexual and romantic relationships. 

Another gap in the current implementation of RSE is the inadequate training teachers receive. 

Teachers aren’t specifically trained to teach RSE, despite how difficult it can be to deliver such a program to students.

“Increasing restrictions on social media and access to pornography… doesn’t make sense without more investment in RSE and without working with education departments to resource teachers,” Professor Power stated.

The Respectful Relationships program plays an important role in educating young people on consent, but What Were You Wearing?, Anasina Gray-Barberio MP, and more importantly, young Australians need more.

“It’s not enough that we are just talking about consent. We should also be talking about prevention. We should be normalising having these conversations about violence,” Gray-Barberio said.