Contents
Study design
This research was a qualitative exploratory study using two focus group discussions with respectful relationships educators. It was designed to elicit conversation about how they have observed children and young people in Victorian classrooms talk about gender, social media, and harmful images generated by their peers using AI programs and apps, as well as the ways that peer, teacher and school community interactions and dynamics shape attitudes towards use of AI-generated images and image sharing.
Participants’ observations from their work in classrooms provided a rich source of ethnographic data that they then contributed to the study in the focus group discussions. Body Safety Australia fosters a culture of continuous learning, sharing experiences from practice and prioritising peer-to-peer skills building across the organisation. This is particularly relevant for educator staff who need to ensure their classroom references and approaches remain salient for young people, even in the context of rapidly changing cultural trends. This commitment to gathering and sharing information through observation, debriefing with peers and senior staff, and formal professional development inputs is normally aimed toward improving classroom practice and addressing emerging issues or problems. It also provided an ideal context to channel the educators’ collective practice expertise and culture of building shared knowledge as participant-researchers in this study.
Body Safety Australia and Respect Victoria jointly led the research. Both organisations contributed primary prevention expertise to the project. Body Safety Australia contributed additional expertise on RRE, the role and impact of rapidly changing technologies on the experience of violence and abuse enacted by children and young people, and implications for prevention work in classrooms. Respect Victoria led the literature review component of the research, and Body Safety Australia led the design and facilitation of the focus groups. Both organisations undertook the qualitative analysis and interpretation presented in this report.
The Victorian Department of Health and Department of Families, Fairness and Housing Human Research Ethics Committee approved all aspects of the research (115818/DOH-2025-466716).
Study participants
Respectful relationships educators are specialist practitioners contracted by schools to facilitate respectful relationships and consent education in classrooms. They play an important role in the prevention of gendered violence and harmful sexual behaviours exhibited by children and young people. These educators teach children, families, teachers and other school staff about children’s right to bodily autonomy and respect for the rights of others. For younger children, the discussions are typically grounded in the physical space, such as teaching consent for hugs and kisses with relatives. As children grow and become increasingly engaged in online spaces and technology, this discussion centres increasingly on consent and respect for others within online and digital contexts.
Respectful relationships educators must be up to date with current online trends, platforms and discourse, and the ways that they shift and change, sometimes in a matter of weeks or days. These educators frequently draw on what is popular online at any given time, to engage children and young people and ensure that messages are relatable. Their time spent in classrooms with young people talking about consent, technology use, gender norms, misogyny and violence lends them a unique practice perspective for research to draw on.
Education staff at Body Safety Australia work with children and families across early childhood, primary school and secondary school settings. This means that Body Safety Australia educators engage with children from their pre-school years (ages 3–5) through to young people in their final year of secondary school (ages 17–18). Specific contact hours within education settings vary on a weekly basis. In the 2023–24 financial year, Body Safety Australia staff delivered 737 programs to children and young people, 199 to parents and caregivers, and 119 professional development programs to teaching staff (64).
This breadth of knowledge is combined with an organisational culture of sharing contemporary observations from work in classrooms and with school communities and reflexive practice development at Body Safety Australia, which is described above. The focus group participants were therefore able to draw on a wealth of practice observations; these were distilled during the discussions facilitated by the research team, and the findings from these discussions are presented in this report.
Eligibility and recruitment
Eligible participants were Body Safety Australia staff who had been employed as RRE program facilitators for at least six months on 24 February 2025, with experience working within Victorian primary and/or secondary schools.
Body Safety Australia recruited participants individually to participate with an invitation email sent by Body Safety Australia’s administrative staff to avoid staff feeling pressured or coerced to participate. Ten of the cohort of 15 individuals employed as educators were invited to participate in the study. The remaining 5 were not approached, as they were newly recruited to Body Safety Australia in February 2025 and were still undertaking onboarding training. Participants were provided with a Participation Information and Consent Form (PICF) and plain language statement, which they returned to the lead researcher at Respect Victoria if they consented to participate.
Nine staff in total participated in the focus group interviews. Staff were assigned to one of two focus groups based upon their availability during standard hours of work.
Participation was voluntary and focus group discussions were conducted during participants’ normal working hours. Participants did not receive remuneration for their involvement in the research, other than their ordinary wages.
Focus group participants
Participants had been working for between nine months and seven years as respectful relationships educators at Body Safety Australia. Six participants were cisgender women and three were transgender or gender diverse.
At the time of the study, participants were employees of a well-recognised organisation and part of a specialised and small field of practitioners delivering RRE within many school and early childhood settings in Victoria. The nature of their field of work meant that participants were at a higher risk of being identifiable by participating in the research than a standard classroom teacher. The research team therefore decided to not report on demographic data other than gender and length of tenure with Body Safety Australia, to minimise the risk of any individual participant being identified in this research report.
Table 1: Length of work experience with Body Safety Australia
| Time range | Number of participants |
|---|---|
| 6–7 years | 1 |
| 2–3 years | 2 |
| 1–2 years | 4 |
| 6–12 months | 2 |
Table 2: Type of employment when the study was conducted
| Type of employment | Number of participants |
|---|---|
| Full time | 3 |
| Part time | 3 |
| Casual | 3 |
The focus group participants had a range of experiences working with children and young people from as young as 3 in early childhood settings to 17- and 18-year-olds in upper secondary school. Body Safety Australia is engaged to provide more RRE programs to children between the ages of 8 and 12 in middle and upper primary school (years 3–6) than they are to early childhood/early primary and senior secondary classes. As a result, participants were more likely to draw upon examples and reflections related to their experiences with middle and upper primary students and their families during the focus group discussions.
Data collection and management
The two focus groups were held in March 2025, with a total of nine participants across both groups. Discussions lasted approximately two hours and were based on a semi-structured discussion guide designed to elicit conversation about educators’ observations, views and experiences with RRE program delivery in schools (see Appendix A). Staff were invited to reflect on what they have observed about:
- how children discuss gender and gender inequality
- how they express sexism and misogyny in the classroom
- how they talk about social media algorithms, the taking and sharing of images (including intimate images), and use of generative AI.
The focus groups were not designed to collect information about individual schools or students.
Discussions were held face to face in a private meeting room at the Body Safety Australia office during office hours.
Examples and reflections shared related to what participants observed in Victorian primary schools during their entire duration of employment working as an educator for Body Safety Australia. Most of these centred upon observations and experiences from the past year of delivering programs to children and parents; however, the three participants with three or more years of experience also drew upon earlier observations from delivering RRE programs.
Analysis
The discussions were audio-recorded, transcribed, de-identified and stored on a secured server. Transcripts were uploaded into NVivo 15 for analysis. Body Safety Australia led the thematic analysis (65), using an inductive semantic approach to identify emerging themes from the discussions. Kate Hepworth (Body Safety Australia) developed a preliminary codebook using these themes. She then revised this in a second round of coding, noting decision-making in the codebook and eliminating superfluous codes. Hazel Donley (Respect Victoria) reviewed, verified and revised codes and data. Hepworth and Donley then collaborated to group codes into themes for analysis, and to write up the analysis into a final report of findings. This was periodically verified by the chief investigator of the study at Respect Victoria and by members of the Body Safety Australia and Respect Victoria executive during two project governance group meetings.
Limitations
There are some limitations to this research that should be considered when reading this report.
As the focus groups were held with respectful relationships educators, not students, the thematic analysis and interpretation focuses on educators’ observations of how students discuss image sharing, social media usage, online gaming and generative AI in the classroom, and the ways they express misogyny and sexism.
The researchers did not talk directly to children and young people. This was due to the time and resource limitations and rigour of ethical considerations required to talk to children in research, particularly about sensitive issues such as misogyny and technology-facilitated gendered violence.
This research examined the observations and perspectives of a small group of RRE practitioners from Body Safety Australia and is therefore not reflective of a full range of experiences of RRE educators or of children and young people. Due to the small sample size of this study, the findings should be viewed as exploratory and not confirmatory.