Students to study sexualised personal ads in class
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A new Victorian school curriculum will ask school children to study sexualised personal ads and write their own.
The advertisements, some of which include sexualised material, are included in the new Building Respectful Relationships Program – part of a massive push by the Andrews Victorian state government to curb the domestic violence epidemic.
The curriculum will also include lessons in sexual harassment, changing attitudes to gender and the laws of consent, according to The Australian.
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But it’s the new statewide initiative of asking children to write their own personal advertisements that is likely to command the attention of parents.
One such example features a “lustful, sexually generous’’ person seeking “sexy freak out with similarly intentioned woman’’.
Another features a “30-year-old blonde bombshell, wild and sexy, living in the fast lane’’.
Under the new program, high school students as young as 12 will be shown the ads and asked to construct their own, with their “perfect partner” in mind.
The exercise is designed to “get students to think about the characteristics of an intimate relationship and how the expectations of this relationship can differ from other types of relationships’’.
Children are asked to suggest what they think older people are looking for in a relationship, and whether this changes with age.
They are also asked to consider how being in a same-sex relationship or from a different culture may change what you need from a relationship.
The Building Respectful Relationships material will replace religious education classes in Victorian state high schools in 2016, with the Andrews government announcing this week it plans to extend the program to primary school and kindergartens.
The program has been introduced in response to the finding of the Royal Commission into Family Violence. The final report from the 13-month long inquiry was tabled on March 30.
A number of Victorians affected by domestic violence contributed to the findings.