Australia, we need to talk about consent

Consent education begins at home, continues at school, and goes on throughout our whole lives, from the first time grandma wants a kiss and doesn't get one, to explaining to prospective partners why you will never be interested in anal penetration. It's lifelong learning. Because it is not just about consent to sex - it is also about our relationships with each other.

Which is why we should be very grateful to the two women who put consent on the national agenda: Saxon Mullins and Chanel Contos.

From the moment they entered our consciousness, they changed the way we think about consent and relationships more broadly. And they both know there is much more work to be done.

This week, Chanel Contos met with Prime Minister Scott Morrison to discuss consent education and seek a national survey of 150,000 students to discover what high school students know about consent, sexual assault, respect, and relationships. And that comes after every state and territory education minister agreed to mandate consent education in every Australian school, after Contos's impressive campaigning. That all began when she asked people on Instagram if they had ever been sexually assaulted while at school. Within days, what had always been private, pained discussions were now public, and forcing schools to face up to what they had always ignored. Now governments are being forced to face up, too.

And this year, Saxon Mullins will see affirmative consent laws introduced into the ACT Assembly. Affirmative consent laws have already been adopted in NSW and proposed in Victoria. Mullins survived her 2013 sexual assault - and the subsequent criminal trial and appeals - to advocate for a review of sexual assault laws. She's been successful. Like Contos, she has been an extraordinary campaigner. She began by revealing her story on Four Corners, and now works at Rape and Sexual Assault Research and Advocacy (RASARA). Like Contos, her work forced governments to face up, this time to endemic sexual assault.

But what needs to happen next? These two women know we need to achieve change, but also know it will be slow. It's one thing to be in a classroom and hear what teachers are saying, it's quite another for it to trickle into our families - because that's where we learn about love and relationships.

Amanda Keddie, a professor of education at Deakin University and a gender and social issues researcher, is delighted with the mountain-moving that's taking place.

"We now have so much more public attention, but now we will have to ensure there is the professional development of teachers in this space. Teachers feel ill-equipped to teach this material," she says.

Partly that's generational. She says she learns a lot from her daughter, who is 30.

"That generation is far less restrictive. The politics of it is quite contentious, and teachers can say the wrong thing without meaning it."

These issues and concepts of gender and sexuality diversity within the context of consent education are not only changing quickly - and as such, reflect political contention - but they are also emotionally discomforting spaces, because we are necessarily challenging gendered and heterosexualised norms.

"Teachers fear getting it wrong," Keddie says.

Saxon Mullins can attest to that. She remembers that in high school, her teacher turned on a sex education video and left the room. The video showed two cartoon characters who emerged from under a blanket with a baby. That was it.

She says her teacher's discomfort was contagious. And it wasn't just in sex ed. Reproductive systems were taught in a very scientific way (good). But when it came to talking about periods, the boys left the room (terrible).

"So as much as we can say, amazing, we are introducing this into the curriculum, we need to be training teachers to be the right people to deliver," Mullins says.

And she will never forget just how uncomfortable her teacher was with this part of the curriculum: "It was horrible and and it stuck with me."

The introduction of consent education is just the beginning, Mullins says. The survey of school students will provide a baseline of what is actually being learnt.

"We really we have to acknowledge where we currently are to fix it," she says.

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As Katrina Marson, who works with Mullins at RASARA, wrote earlier this week: "This is where we have always stalled on sex ed in Australia: implementation. Australia has produced some of the best RSE researchers and providers in the world, and yet it has never crossed over into classrooms, into changed attitudes, into changed statistics about the rates of unwanted sex for young Australians."

Contos is aware of these risks, and is determined to mitigate them. She has made it clear to the government that there must be resourcing for creating adequate teaching materials.

"Education is the most transformative part of the culture and teachers are absolutely catalysts in that - but there needs to be a culture of change in the whole school," she says.

Rape "jokes", catcalls, victim-blaming, promoting problematic stereotypes, all need to be taken seriously.

"We are focusing on school because curriculum can be controlled, measured and standardised," she says.

She also acknowledges this campaign of respect for each other needs to include what we learn at home, from the outset of our lives. Parenting books are the worst, she says. They have so many harmful stereotypes.

Contos, who now works at the Australia Institute, would love to be a teacher. After three degrees and an astonishingly successful Teach Us Consent campaign, she has lots more to do to make change permanent.

But she would love to return to Kambala, the Sydney school where her investigations began, to talk about what went wrong - and how to make it right for all of us.