How Lauren and Ruby won government funding for education around consent and healthy relationships

Published in

ActionStation Aotearoa

9 min readSep 5, 2018

Lauren and Ruby last year were two high school students who ran a campaign to get better sex education around consent in NZ high schools. This year they won with the Mates and Dates programme given funding by the Government to roll out nationwide.

Eliot talked with Lauren one year on from the petition delivery to MP Grant Robertson, the now Minister of Finance.

Quotes are Lauren’s unless otherwise attributed.

Image: Ruby and Lauren standing in front of Parliament with MPs Chris Bishop (National), Jan Logie (Greens), Grant Robertson (Labour), Jenny Salesa (Labour) and Ruth Dyson (Labour). The sign on the petition box says “5708 demand better sex education in all schools”.

The moment

The campaign started with a crisis, which led to a very simple vision — that every New Zealand teenager should have the tools, education and knowledge to better understand the concept of consent in healthy relationships.

Lauren’s now a music student in the first year of university but in March last year was starting her year 13 at Wellington High School (WHS). It was at this time that Wellington Boys College students made comments online about taking advantage of women while drunk — creating a huge uproar around the schools in Wellington.

“The things those boys were saying spread to other schools quite quickly because of social media. They posted these comments on Facebook which made it very easy to spread because they could be screenshot and sent to other people — the evidence this had happened wouldn’t fade. That caused quite an uproar at other schools.”

Why does Lauren think this moment was different from other times?

“There are lots of subtle ways that rape culture presents itself in our society and a lot of the the time we’ll turn a blind eye to them but I think these were such blatant comments that you could see something was really wrong that high school boys were saying these things and that caused a really large response.”

The comments sparked a rally outside Parliament, organised by students from Wellington East Girls College and supported by students from other schools.

The Boys College students were suspended two days after the rally. But Lauren says it didn’t address the real problem.

“I had mixed feelings about the whole thing because while I was glad people were saying something about rape culture a lot of people were focusing on those comments and those boys from Coll which I think was both unfair and not very helpful in the long run. It makes it seem like it’s an isolated incident and it’s a couple of boys that said something when it’s actually a large scale issue and affects everyone.”

The campaign

Lauren and Ruby started a petition one week after the rally. It didn’t start fully formed.

Lauren remembers one of the speakers at the rally said there needed to be better sex education as prevention. Rather than just offering punishment after the event, there needed to be more done to prevent it from happening in the first place — and this is what sparked the idea for the petition.

In the experience of Lauren, Ruby and their friends, they had found classes on sex education varied a lot depending on the teachers.

This has serious implications in the real world. Young people are statistically at the highest risk of being sexually assaulted; the 16–24 year old age group is four times more likely to be sexually assaulted than any other age group. According to HELP, the Auckland provider of sexual abuse support services, 1 in 3 girls experience sexual assault before the age of 16. The same goes for 1 in 7 of boys.

Lauren was an active member of the feminist club at WHS.

“A lot of people at my school would talk about these things like this quite regularly, it wasn’t just in the background.”

Once the petition was up on OurActionStation it was taking off before they knew it.

“It was live on the website earlier than we thought it was going to be and we looked and it already had a thousand signatures and we didn’t even know what was going on!
I think I was at orchestra at the time and I got a call asking if I could do a radio interview.”

She says especially at the start they made a big effort to gather different experiences from people and think about the best way to achieve change that would really make a difference.

“Most of [the campaign] was trying to figure out what we wanted and what we thought was best, gathering experiences from people from different schools, trying to gauge other teenagers reaction and thoughts on how we could best address the issue.”
“It was conversations with people we knew, it wasn’t formal information gathering, just trying to have conversations with other people, both our age and a bit younger.”
“We thought about the obstacle of each school interpreting consent in its own way and we thought it would be better if there was one course being taught throughout schools. Also we knew there were inconsistencies between teachers — at our school one teacher who didn’t feel comfortable talking about some of the topics so he skipped over them.”

To find out more they talked to friends at other schools who had done Mates and Dates, a healthy relationships course for secondary school students. They then went to talk to the people at Mates and Dates in person and added the course as the key ask after the petition was underway.

To build the petition they collected signatures at CubaDupa Festival on the street in person. They shared the petition on social media as much as they could, and tried to get other people to share it.

“There was definitely a thrill at the beginning of doing something and feeling like we might actually be able to accomplish something — the first rush of signatures was really exciting and ‘wow, something’s really happening’ we’re creating social change.”

Lauren and Ruby were also part of a larger network in the beginning, talking about what to do with allies such as Eva’s Wish, a campaign to empower people affected by sexual violence.

In May it was reported that fewer than half of secondary schools were using either of the two Government-endorsed programmes created to help teach teens about healthy relationships and consent. This clearly showed the big gaps and inconsistencies in the teaching of consent between schools.

At the beginning there was quite a big group of people who were interested and involved but they were not so interested in being part of the campaign after it started — “it slowly dwindled down to me and Ruby”.

Delivering the petition

It was at the end of July that Lauren and Ruby organised to do one last push and started putting together a petition delivery event. They invited their local MP Grant Robertson to accept the petition and MPs from the other parties.

They wrote and sent out a media release that got picked up by many media outlets [see below for a full list], including an interview on current affairs show The Project with Kanoa Lloyd.

Image: Lauren on current affairs show The Project

They did one last push to share the petition, and with the support of the ActionStation community it reached almost 6000 signatures.

MP Grant Robertson (now Minister of Finance), Ruby and Lauren speaking on the steps of Parliament.

Their call received wide media coverage, including a feature on One News that night, and public support from organisations such as the National Council of Women of New Zealand.

“Best practice consent — and healthy relationships — education is the best tool we have to reduce the perpetration of sexual violence. I’m not talking about one-off random sessions in assembly — no matter how inspirational the speaker might be — I’m talking about skills-based activities which allow students to build on the consent skills they already have and practice them in various situations.
We need to bring consent to life for high school students, and Mates and Dates in all New Zealand high schools would ensure this education wasn’t a lottery — as it is now.”
— Vanisa Dhiru, President of the National Council of Women of New Zealand and Gender Equal NZ spokesperson

Push through Parliament

Many people had reached out during the campaign and offered support. Lauren and Ruby were invited to speak at the UN Women National Committee AGM in September that year and many people who signed shared their own experiences with them.

In October the rape culture became a conversation the whole world was having when the #MeToo movement became one of the biggest ever social media events in the world.

Then in December Lauren was invited to make a formal written submission to the politicians on the Education Select Committee considering the petition. Lauren was able to use some of the responses from their conversations at the start of the campaign for the submission.

“Many of us teenagers, still in high school, have experienced sexual harassment, sometimes within school environments. We’re scared, we assume that this will be a part of our lives, and it doesn’t come as a surprise when we’re catcalled or people make jokes about rape. We don’t want to live in a world where rape culture is normal anymore.” — from the Submission to the Education Select Committee on better sex education in high schools, 2017

A win for consent and healthy relationships

In July this year the Government announced funding to roll out Mates and Dates nationwide, a year after the campaign started! Lauren says it’s a big success.

“What has happened with [the roll-out of] Mates and Dates is almost exactly what we asked.”

But she also remembers it was always more than just the one ask.

“Apart from what we were asking for in the petition our biggest goal was just creating the conversation and keeping it in people’s minds — because often something will happen and then there’s a rally or there’s a big uproar about it and everyone will forget about it and go back to how they usually go about things.”

The campaign is an awesome example of young women speaking up for themselves. Lauren and her friends identified a necessary solution to the problem of rape culture at high schools and aimed for a specific target who could make that happen.

In doing so they mobilised thousands of supporters and used the available tools to get leverage in our democratic system to get change.

“I don’t think I would have done anything differently … but if there was something to make the campaign more effective I would’ve tried to keep pushing through those months [when they got busy] and carry on trying to grow the campaign apart from just letting signatures come in. Maybe tried to get in touch with people from other schools more and try and get them to promote it within their schools and talk to more teachers about it and things like that.”

By reaching out through their own networks and capturing media attention they achieved their chief aim — to start a conversation around this issue.

They’ve also done much more, and made a difference for future generations of young people who will have access to consent education. Who knows what that means for New Zealand?

Postscript

While funding for specific education programmes around healthy relationships and consent is much needed, there is still work to do.

Te Whāriki Takapou is calling for school programmes that address the specific needs of Māori and Pasifika students.

Government funding for organisations that support victims and survivors of sexual violence have been underfunded for decades and schools still aren’t required to teach about consent or sexual violence prevention. It’s left up to each school to decide. This needs to change.

Sign the petition to support the call for changes in the way the government deals with sexual harm and funds its treatment and prevention here.

***