Turn Up Respect Hero Video

[Nooky]

Respect.

Respect for ourselves, for our culture, for each other.

It helps us stand tall and be the warriors we always have been.

Our kids look to us, their mob, mums and dads, aunties, uncles, nans and pops, Elders, mates, to help show them the way.

But these days, there's lots of other voices they're hearing online and on social media.

And they're teaching our kids all kinds of bad, disrespectful stuff about women and girls.

Stuff that can lead to violence.

Violence against women isn't part of our culture.

It never has been.

So we need to drown out the noise from those bad influences and turn up our voices.

Not just online, but everywhere.

Because when we teach our kids respect for themselves, culture, Country and each other, things change and those disrespectful influences, they lose. Because we've turned up respect.

The YoungN Deadly mob at Dijun Way, they know exactly what I'm talking about.

They know the best way to tackle those bad influences that hate on women is by turning up respect and teaching our boys all about healthy relationships.

Turn it up.

[YoungN Deadly Dijun Way]

The importance of bringing primary prevention to our youth is that it breaks the cycle.

We have seen the cycle go around and around and around for a very long time.

Dijun Way is a primary prevention family domestic violence program.

It's targeted at the ages of 12 to 18 years old.

We talk about what's unhealthy and healthy in a relationship.

With our program we promote positivity, equality and respect.

Dijun Way's program is designed to stop it at the start.

We're trying to install in the youth to change the thinking, change the ways.

Unhealthy signs that they thought might have been healthy or normalised, potentially now they know, actually that's not right, that's not how it should be.

I reckon Dijun Way is a really good program for young teens to learn. Because they might go in a relationship and the stuff that they might think that is normal, Dijun Way taught them that is wrong, shows them respect, loyalty, stuff like that, stuff to do in a healthy relationship.

These young Aboriginal boys understand on social media there's a lot of 'you've got to be the man', 'you've got to be strong', 'you don't show emotions'.

We want the youth to show emotions.

So if they don't show emotions, we don't know how they're feeling, they can't express to their, if they're in a relationship, how they're feeling.

So this is what we're trying to do.

We're trying to stop it at the start and educate the youth because it's the next generation coming up now and they can pass it down to generation to generation.

We want to try and educate and install positivity within the community.

I've taken on a lot about respecting women and girls.

It's all about trust, being loyal, communication.

Especially with online stuff, like, you wouldn't want to be doing anything online that you wouldn't send to your mother or your grandma, so that's exactly how I look at it.

We try and educate the kids not to follow everything you see on social media.

There's people online that could be toxic.

We want them to be role models in the community and to treat women with respect.

The negative stuff about women and girls that we see online all the time just isn't right.

We've learnt that through Dijun Way.

We give them the support, we give them the education.

We really give them the tools to be able to have healthy relationships.

We feel so proud about what we do as facilitators.

It's very rewarding promoting respect, equality, and just getting them to open up sometimes as well.

Some of the students that have been maybe the most withdrawn have been the best students by the end of it.

We need leaders, Indigenous men, to be there to protect, provide.

The importance of this is to have strong leaders.

We give them the tools and we break the cycle.

[Nooky]

Teaching our young people about respect can help stop violence towards women and girls at the start.

Teaching them about culture helps do the same thing.

It may not seem like a straightforward way to tackle the problem.

It may not look like the way the whitefellas do it.

But the aunties at Banatjarl know connecting to Country and culture helps to empower the next generation to be strong.

Helping all of us turn up respect.

[Banatjarl Strongbala Wimun Grup]

My name is Andrea Andrews.

I'm a Jawoyn woman, and I come from the Bagala clan group, and I'm working for the Banatjarl Strongbala Wimun Grup here in Katherine.

My name is Miliwanga Wurrben.

I am a Rembarrnga woman of Central Arnhem Land.

My clan group is the Mirratja people.

The Strong Wimun Grup has been there for a very long time, 20, 30 odd years, and this old lady here was part of that, starting in the beginning.

It's about healing and empowering our women to be stronger so that they can be stronger for their families as well.

When it comes to prevention, this is where these young women will come.

And so when we have a yarning circle, we're able to let them know the culture, you know, Indigenous culture.

So we have to go back to the beginning, almost in the Dreamtime, to actually explain how it was with our men and women.

We bring out all these, you know, customary laws and our kinship relationship system, everything that a woman needs to know.

So the wellbeing that we teach comes from our cultural activities such as weaving and painting, and ceramic making, you know?

Learning on Country, which is what Banatjarl is all about.

So we have camps there at times, and we invite all these women to come and just have a feel, you know, about the Country and feel of the animals and our ancestral spirits of the land.

Because we are not working alone.

They will always be with us.

We teach them how to respect and acknowledge not only the land, but themselves.

I want my kids and my grandkids and my families and everyone else to have that respect so that they can have positive outcome.

If you don't have respect, you're always going to, you'll be sort of down and out.

Respect for me is a very important word for myself, and of course, our Elders.

So Mila here, in order for us to have a good relationship, we both need to respect each other and that's how, that's how it should be.

[Nooky]

Our women, they're survivors and leaders.

They've always been our backbone.

Strong women making us stronger, and it's still the case now.

Look at U Right Sis?

They're on the front line teaching our sisters how to recognise, report and respond to online disrespect, turning down those bad voices and turning up respect.

[U Right Sis?]

For me, working in domestic family sexual violence was never a choice.

It was something that I had to do. Because it affected my whole family, affected me and it affects my community. So, I don't believe you can sit around and complain about something and not be willing to be a part of the solution.

Every part of this country has its own story, its own history, its own nation, its own culture.

U Right Sis? is place-based, localised, culturally appropriate, primary prevention.

U Right Sis? is an amazing program that empowers First Nations women to understand when they are experiencing technology-facilitated abuse.

Some women have experienced it and not understood that when they have been abused online or when things have been posted without their consent, that it's actually illegal and it's a form of abuse.

Some women are not understanding that it sits alongside other types of what we call coercive control.

We let the women lead the workshops. So depending what is happening in the community at the time before we go in, we're always invited.

Once we are invited, before we run anything, we say hey what's going on, what's the issues that this community is experiencing?

Once we get an understanding of what is impacting the community then we let them tell us and then from that we will structure our workshops around their needs.

U Right Sis? is community-owned and it's community-led, so what that means is that everything that is created by U Right Sis? is created with community. So it's co-produced and then very importantly is co-owned. So everything that's created is owned by the community members, the communities that produce it.

So they have ultimate say over how the resources are used, how they're disseminated, where they're shown, the language that's being used in them, and they retain their intellectual and cultural property over everything that U Right Sis? creates.

And that reinforces self-determination, which is really important in any kind of localised response.

It's great to see young First Nations women deliver workshops for women and girls in their own community.

My team and some of the other teams that we're in partnership with are leaders in their own right in their community. Whether they're captains of their footy team or whether they're just young women that other younger women look up to.

So for them to be in community, delivering a workshop, talking about respectful relationships, healthy relationships, and that experiencing technology-facilitated abuse is not okay, and is never your fault, and it's not something you have to put up with, is exceptionally powerful.

U Right Sis? is local and it's good and it's comfortable and you want Aboriginal people to feel comfortable in workshops on hard topics like this.

It helps me knowing that there's programs out there that talks about staying safe online. Teaching my sister, teaching my cousin, teaching my family back at home, in my community, in my homelands.

We have seen an increase of people addressing tech-facilitated abuse.

People are now calling out behaviour, saying, hey, you're not going to track me on online devices, hey, you're not going to have access to my Facebook.

We are seeing women empowered saying to police, I'm experiencing tech-facilitated abuse, or they're telling their lawyers or frontline workers, hey, this is what I'm experiencing.

So we know through our monitoring and evaluation that 100% of our participants are walking out that door knowing how to access services, knowing that services exist where they can get help.

That makes me really excited.

They know where to go to now.

They know what eSafety is.

Yeah, they know now.

You just need to go out there and educate mob.

[Nooky]

Respect is all about sharing and looking after each other.

It's what our people do.

That's why teaching each other about culture, lifting each other up, being role models is so important.

That's how the Kayin Ipikazil program works.

It works with our young women to help them understand what is and isn't okay in relationships. Supporting them in their choices, turning up respect and helping to break the cycle.

[Kayin Ipikazil]

Being a mother of four girls myself, I wanted to do something different to how I was raised.

Break cycles, provide information, knowledge, you know, education is power and knowledge is power to do things differently.

Kayin Ipikazil is a program that I founded with a friend of mine, a few other women as well and we're talking about the importance of girls having mentors. Having women that they can connect with, look up to and learn from as they navigate through their adolescent years.

I work in the high school and I see the difficulties our young women go through, so to be able to pass on my knowledge and my experience as a Torres Strait Islander woman was something I felt very passionately drawn towards.

Working as a teacher here you see students come in with a trauma background. They've suffered some kind of trauma in their lives and that impacts their learning, number one, but it also impacts the choices that they make in their relationships, in friendships or other relationships that they have.

And, so the importance of this program is paramount just because it builds the confidence in them to make decisions about what's okay and what's not okay. And seeing the young people be able to make those decisions, those positive choices, has just been amazing.

So, Kayin Ipikazil provides a platform where we can share our experiences, not always negative, positive too. But definitely things that we can look back on and see wasn't healthy, wasn't respectful so that our young women are more aware.

And this is experiences I've gone through or experiences I've seen my loved ones go through and how I want to be able to empower them with knowledge.

Trying to help them zone in on, well, who are you?

And what's your core value?

And what do you want in life?

Because you actually have a choice to decide what the outcome of your life is going to be.

The role Kayin Ipikazil plays in preventing family violence is so revolved around respect, self-respect, and when you respect yourself enough to know what you want, you know what to expect in others and what you will allow and what you won't allow.

In the five years that I've been here working with the young people, I've been able to watch some of these young Torres Strait Islander women go through the Kayin Ipikazil program and watch them develop the relationships with some of the mentors that have seen a whole heap of growth in their confidence, in their resilience and in their respect for themselves really and the respect that they have built with the mentors as well.

So all of that growth is going to help them as they grow into young adult.

Before the Kayin Ipikazil, I felt like there was like nowhere to just go and vent.

Like I didn't have that support.

I didn't have the confidence to just go and sit down and talk about how I felt.

I guess just not using my words and just keeping everything inside.

Now I feel like I can go and sit down with my mentors or my family member and tell them how I feel, like I don't keep it inside anymore and it makes me feel happy, like I don't have to carry that weight all the time.

The impact of the Kayin Ipikazil program has been very humbling.

I don't think I realise how much of an impact we have until you reflect back or you just see what some young women are doing and I don't think it's directly because of Kayin Ipikazil, there's other factors as well, but I like to feel like we have a part, we've played a part in someone's life and it's always about planting that seed.

There's no shame in having support and help in things that you don't know how to do.

Because how else are you going to learn?

Like, you need the help and support.

And if it's there, take it.

Because you will succeed in things that you don't know you will succeed in.

And it's a very good outcome when you do.

It's a really good one.

The support helped me graduate.

The support helped me in a lot of things actually, communicating, listening to others, and not just lashing out.

Becoming a different person of myself than I was before.

And I can see it now.

[Nooky]

I want to make this place better for my kids.

I want to leave something behind for them.

I want to teach them respect for themselves, their culture, and each other.

So they can tune out those bad influences.

But you can't be what you can't see.

Which is why I started We Are Warriors.

[We Are Warriors]

I noticed pretty early on that music was healing to me.

That's why I continued to do it.

It kept me out of trouble and it kept me kind of regulated.

The microphone was like a therapy session, you know what I'm saying?

It's like all the frustrations I was feeling would be put into the microphone and the microphone was like the best listener, so all it did was listen to what I had to say, it didn't talk back, it didn't, you know, say negative things, it allowed me to just let it all out, use it to create something good.

I feel like that was the power for me.

We Are Warriors is an organisation I started about two years ago now.

The through-line of We Are Warriors is that you can't be what you can't see, so I kind of set out to highlight and amplify these stories of Blak success and get it across to the kids and we do that through our events, the content we create and our workshop series that we do in community.

You know what the kids can get from these workshops is all about healthy relationships and respect for people, respect for other genders and other people's walks of life and other people's stories.

We're in these rooms and everybody's sharing.

The young men are sharing, the young women are sharing, and they're sharing their experiences and blending them to one, to make one message.

The We Are Warriors program helps build respectful relationships by firstly seeing Corey as a positive role model, creating a safe space for them to be vulnerable with their feelings and their emotions, and also looking at, you know, how to cope with things that might be quite difficult or challenging for them in their life.

To be able to build their capacity to express their emotions appropriately, I feel that it's helped them re-engage within school and also helped build their confidence and their self-efficacy, and overall self-esteem, which helps foster developing positive relationships.

The program makes me feel proud of myself, it teaches me a lot about respect.

I just feel more confident about myself.

You're able to channel frustrations and emotions and channel them into creating good and use them to fuel your creativity, and that was for me the whole reason why I got into it.

When you're able to evaluate yourself and your mental health, your physical health, looking inside of yourself and healing traumas that might be there that you might not even know are there, especially when there's a youth we're talking about, they don't understand these things yet.

So to get in there and be able to address them and address them without even trying to, you know, it just so happens that the power of music and creativity, it has that good healing energy in it, so it just does the work for you.

This has, like, changed me heaps, you know, like it's made me a different person.

I always used to muck up, I always used to do naughty stuff, you know, and just run amok basically.

But after this, music just calms me.

And when I'm frustrated and angry, music's key.

You can go outside, get some fresh air and chuck on some music and I'm right, you know.

It's just all about just learning who you are and be proud of who you are.

Just being proud of to be an Aboriginal, you know, because not many people have that privilege.

At the centre of it is about, you know, Blak success.

But involved with that is healthy relationships, healthy boundaries, respect for yourself, respect for others.

And I think, you know, learning these things through the power of music, it does have that knock-on effect to work towards preventing family violence, because these workshops are able to do these things, but kids can have fun while they're doing it.

[Nooky]

Those online influencers hating on women, trying to fill our kids' ears with disrespectful stuff, they don't stand a chance against this.

Our voices, our culture.

So let's be loud and proud.

Let's raise our voices and teach our kids about respect every day in our communities, because respect for ourselves, our culture, our Country, and each other can drown out the voices of disrespect. Anywhere. It's time to pump up the volume. Let's Turn Up Respect.