Two years ago, Chanel Contos started an Instagram poll asking for testimonials from young Australian woman who had been sexually assaulted. Contos uncovered over 6,000 horror stories about sexual abuse and coercion in Sydney’s elite private schools.
She used those stories to highlight how our schools were failing to properly teach us about consent. She started a petition called Teach Us Consent which received 44,000 signatures. It attracted the attention of political leaders, led to a meeting with the Prime Minister at the time Scott Morrison and the work to change the way consent is taught in our schools.
Chanel has written a book called Consent Laid Bare and she’s working with Julia Gillard’s Global Institute for Women’s Leadership.
In this episode of The Briefing, Tom Tilley speaks with Chanel about her new book Consent Laid Bare.
We need to have explicit conversations with young people about what consent is, what not consent is, what this means. We need to embed empathy in the way that they engage in sexual situations so that this isn’t some confusing thing that they need to call back on their PDHPE, but an inherent trait in themselves that they would never put their own sexual entitlement above the desires of another person.
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