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Further implications
The current ground swell of awareness of the dangers faced by Australian girls and women in many aspects of their lives, including in relationships, appears likely to ensure that most states and territories will adopt some form of consent education in their jurisdictions. Victoria has already announced that it will mandate consent education at all levels of state education from Term 2, 2021.
The Queensland government has announced that it will review sexual education in schools across the state to determine whether consent and reporting is being adequately addressed. In New South Wales, Government, Catholic and Independent schools have agreed to help drive community and cultural change around sexual assault and violence by signing a Statement of Intent to strengthen the understanding of consent and harm prevention in school communities. In Tasmania, State government funding for a sexual consent education program provided in Tasmanian public schools is set to run out in three months, and there is mounting pressure for it to be renewed and expanded, Arguments against compulsory sex education frequently draw on claimed shortcomings in sex education in general and consent education in particular. It is important to note that those who support compulsory sex education do not only want that education to be mandatory. They also want it to begin earlier and to be conducted more effectively.
As the different states and territories introduce consent education, its supporters stress that it will be important to develop wide-ranging, age-appropriate programs and ensure that the teachers who deliver this material have been carefully trained to be able to do so. The Greens have criticised the federal government for recycling a package of educational materials that are not tailored to the consent issue they are intended to address. Whatever the truth of this allegation, those who are calling for consent education are looking for best practice consent education at all levels of students' school lives. There have also been calls for a national consent education program. A national program is part of The Greens education policy platform. Supporters of a national consent program claim that it would help to ensure that best practice was adopted nationwide.Critics of compulsory consent education also note that it is not a 'magic bullet' which will automatically remove the problems of coercive relationships and sexual assault.
Defenders of consent education argue that though this form of education may not be a complete solution to the problem, it is part of the solution. However, other social commentators have argued that we must be careful not to stop at consent education. They argue that there must be a concerted effort to counter the multiple media inputs that serve to dehumanize women and mark them as targets for mistreatment. Significant among these is pornography. A large body of research has indicated its widespread consumption among Australian adolescents and children. The same research has pointed to the highly negative consequences pornography viewing has in shaping young people's expectations of sex and young men's view of women. In 2016, the Australian Human Rights Commission made a series of recommendations re reducing the impact of pornography on Australian children and adolescents. Each of these recommendations focused on the importance of education in countering pornography's message and teaching students how to avoid it. Critics have noted that stronger action is needed. It has been claimed that current restrictions are not serving to limit young people's access to these materials. Instead it has been suggested that Australia needs employ measures such as those being developed in the United Kingdom where the British Board of Film Classification (BBFC) will have the ability to block non-compliant websites and request that service providers withdraw their services from non-compliant websites.