Domestic Violence Prevention Education Added To NSW Curriculum After Student Plea

Just weeks after her mother’s suicide, Josie Pohla started a petition and wrote a letter to the government.

What she wanted was simple: for kids to be educated about domestic violence, and how they could seek help.

That was almost one year ago. The petition gained more than 100,000 signatures and reached so far up the political levels that it resulted in a change in New South Wales’ 7-10 school curriculum. This year Josie, now a Year 9 student, will join thousands of other NSW students discussing domestic violence in classrooms across the state.

“I am going to get taught it because I’m in year 9 this year,” she said, about the changes, adding: “It will be pretty cool.”

The Program

The additions are known as the Prevention of Domestic Violence program, and include a number of activities that teachers can bring into their lessons. There’s an 80-page toolkit that helps teachers to broadly instigate the program, encouraging them to develop their student’s understanding of “respectful relationships” in a “variety of contexts and units”. Instead of relying on one-off lessons, the Prevention of Domestic Violence program will bring together a number of “interactive and participatory learning approaches” to help kids gain an understanding of domestic violence issues on both a personal and national level.

For Josie it’s just one more step forward in what has been an incredible year of successes and resilience before obstacles. Josie launched her petition on Change.org in April of last year after her mother,Bindy, committed suicide in March following a long fight against domestic violence. Under the pseudonym ‘Rachel’, Josie typed up her story in her grandmother’s computer saying that she “didn’t know that what happened in my home was different to any other family home” and that her and her family suffered at the hands of their abuser, eventually becoming “silent sufferers of never-ending sadness”. Josie dealt with bulimia, depression, anxiety, disassociation issues and more, while her mother struggled with depression but was not able to cope.

“If domestic violence was addressed within the public schools educational criteria, I could have gotten help and saved my mum,” Josie noted.

Following the success of her petition, Josie won a number of awards and became a finalist in Daily Life’s Women of the Year, recognising and celebrating those women who have taken a stand on important issues in Australia. When Pru Goward, the Minister for the Prevention of Domestic Violence, heard Josie’s story she spoke personally with her, and realised just how important the changes were to Josie and others like her.

“Too often, children in households where domestic violence is the usual state of affairs do not recognise it as abnormal and unacceptable. This was the case in Josie’s home,” she said.

Of course it wasn’t an easy path. Josie’s grandmother, and now full-time carer, Avril Hilton recalls that she was very apprehensive when Josie told her about the petition that she had started, but was amazed at the support she received in the following weeks.

“It just snowballed,” she said. “So many people were able to relate to her story.”

We Applaud Josie

It can be hard to stand up for something, even if you know in your heart that it’s right, which is why we applaud Josie so much. In the face of adversity, tragedy and much sadness she realised that something had to change, and she stood up and made it happen.

It is our hope, and we imagine the hope of many people around Australia, that programs like the Prevention of Domestic Violence that Josie fought for be implemented in curriculums Australia-wide. Domestic violence is an issue that has been gaining considerable traction in recent years, and it has attracted many powerful spokespeople. However, it seems clear to us that the problem will never be fully conquered until all of Australia, young and old, stand against it.