Structures for care and silenced topics: accomplishing gender-based violence prevention education in a primary school

ABSTRACT

Little is known about the conditions that enable teachers to educate others about the troubling issue of gender-based violence. This paper discusses the centrality of structures for care for fostering the willingness and capacity of primary school teachers to initiate classroom talk about this sensitive and silenced issue. Drawing on interviews conducted over 3 years with five teachers and two leaders in a primary school in a culturally and religiously diverse community in Melbourne, Australia, barriers to teaching about gender diversity, gender-based violence and family violence are discussed. This includes teachers’ and leaders’ anxiety about triggering distress and fears about parental backlash. School-level structures that enabled action in the face of challenge are identified, including committed leadership, collaborative organisational culture, ongoing in-house professional learning, compassionate collegial relationships and proactive programme provision. We discuss the implications for those supporting school-wide interventions.

KEYWORDS:

• Care ethic
• difficult knowledge
• gender-based violence
• school leadership
• structures for care
• whole-school approach

Acknowledgments

The interviews reported in this study were conducted as part of an Australian Research Council Linkage project titled ‘Determining Implementation Drivers in Resilience Education’. This three-year project (2016–2019) examined the factors that influence the uptake and the implementation of the Resilience, Rights and Respectful Relationships programme.

We would like to thank the research team involved in this project, the Department of Education and Training and the Victorian Health Promotion Foundation for their research funding and support.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. The Safe Schools programme was an Australian, three-year, federally funded national programme that began in 2013. The programme aimed to ensure the safety of LGBTQI+ students in schools. Safe Schools programme became the topic of controversy in 2016 and its federal funding was not renewed by the coalition government.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Australian Research Council [LP160100428].