Teaching Consent in Secondary Schools: Why Scare Tactics Fail and What Works Instead

Written By Ben Russell

Since 2023, consent education has been mandatory in Australian schools from Foundation to Year 10. That decision followed years of advocacy, including the petition started by Chanel Contos that gathered thousands of testimonies from school-aged students. The mandate answered the question of whether we teach consent. The harder question now becomes, how is it done well?

One thing I do know is that the fastest way to lose a room of teenagers on this topic is to try to scare them, 'death by slides', or worse, give a video on consent from 2015.

Why scare tactics fail with teenagers

The instinct in this approach makes sense on the surface level. The stakes are real, so we reach for the heaviest-hitting material we can find: worst-case stories, legal consequences, cautionary tales. And the students do listen, for a while. But fear can also do something unhelpful in a consent conversation. It may put young people on the defensive.

Boys, in particular, hear fear-based consent education as an accusation. The shutters come down, and walls come up within minutes, and once a 15-year-old decides a session is about telling him he is a problem, no amount of content is going to get through afterwards. Girls, meanwhile, may often hear a message that subtly says to them they have the job of managing everyone else’s behaviour. Neither group walks out better equipped for an actual relationship.

The researchers who study this reached the same conclusion long before I did (well at least a few years ago). Writing on Australia’s move to mandatory consent education, academics at The Conversation made the point that consent is one small part of navigating relationships, and that teaching it in isolation, as a legal line not to cross, misses almost everything that makes authentic, healthy, relationships work. Our Watch’s evidence base echoes these sentiments: effective programs are strengths-based, building skills and empathy rather than only issuing warnings.

What strengths-based consent education looks like

Lets be clear here, a strengths-based approach does not mean soft or underplaying the crucial issues at stake. It simply means starting from a different question. Instead of “here is what you must never do”, it asks “what does getting this right actually look like?”

In practice, that looks like scenarios in lieu of slides. Not the cartoonish ones students roll their eyes at, but the genuinely grey situations they recognise from their own world: the party, the group chat, the awkward first date, the pressure that comes dressed up as a joke, the silence that someone decides to read as agreement.

In a Year 10 session last term, I put a scenario to the room and a student pushed back hard - probably to stir the put and put the spotlight on him (the joy of working with young people). “Why is it on us if it's first a yes, then non-verbal ques can mean now no - talk about unfair” he insisted, arms crossed, half-performing for his mates. Despite every fiber within going to 100 in a fit of rage, I resisted the urge to bite back. Instead, I asked the room what everyone else noticed in the scenario. Slowly, hands started going up. One student pointed out the girl had gone quiet. Another said she had physically started to move away, twice. A third said, “If you have to convince someone to keep going, they’ve already told you the answer.” At the end of the session he stayed back and said, “Sorry for before, the others got me thinking and yeah kind of a dog act to make a scene like I did” The little wins. Not winning an argument with a 15-year-old, but creating an environment where his peers do the teaching.

Consent is a communication skill, not a contract

The legal definitions matter, and affirmative consent laws in most states now set a clear standard: consent must be actively communicated, and it can be withdrawn. Students should absolutely know this.

But a definition on a slide has never helped anyone read a moment. What young people need is practice at the underlying skills: noticing how another person is responding, tolerating the awkwardness of asking, hearing no without treating it as an insult, and saying no without apologising for it. These are teachable skills, the same way we teach anything else, through modelling, practice and honest conversation. When consent is taught as communication rather than contract law, students stop seeing it as a hurdle and start seeing it as something that makes relationships better.

What schools can do beyond the one-off session

A single incursion will not achieve this alone, and schools should be suspicious of anyone claiming otherwise. What the evidence supports is layering. Classroom teaching through HPE and pastoral programs gives the foundation. External sessions add a voice students have not heard before, and create space for questions students will not ask a teacher they see every day. Parent sessions close the loop at home, because the messages compete with whatever is on a student’s phone tonight.

The schools doing this best treat consent education as a years-long conversation that matures with the student: connection and boundaries in Year 7, online respect in Years 8 and 9, and explicit consent education in Years 10 to 12, when it maps onto the relationships students are actually beginning to have.

The conversation students actually want

Believe it or not, when the room is safe and nobody feels accused, teenagers do not resist this conversation. They can get into it - big time. They have questions nobody has given them a safe place to ask. Our job, schools and providers together, is to create these moments.

Empowerment-Ed’s Year 9 to 12 programs teach consent and boundaries through real-life scenarios as part of our Empowering Relationships suite, delivered in schools across Australia and endorsed as a Trusted eSafety Provider. If your school is reviewing its approach to consent education, you can find the year-level breakdown on our Empowering Relationships page.

References

Ben Russell
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