Turn Up Respect Campaign Cutdown

[Nooky]

Respect.

Our young people have always learnt from us, our mob.

But these days, there's a lot of other voices our kids are hearing online and on social media.

Voices teaching them 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 turn up our voices, not just online, but everywhere.

Because when we turn up respect and drown out those disrespectful influencers, they lose.

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

They tackle bad influencers that hate on women 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 this 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 into 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 and 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.

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 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 to do the same thing.

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]

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.

So, the wellbeing that we teach comes from our cultural activities, learning on Country, which is what Banatjarl is all about.

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.

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, our backbone, and it's still the case now.

Look at U Right Sis? They're 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.

So 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.

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

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's great to see young First Nations women deliver workshops for women and girls in their own community. Talking about respectful relationships, healthy relationships, and that experiencing technology-facilitated abuse is not okay, is exceptionally powerful.

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 looking after each other.

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

That's how the Kayin Ipikazil program works.

It helps young women understand what is and isn't okay in relationships. 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.

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.

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.

Before the Kayin Ipikazil, I felt like 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.

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 them to have respect for themselves, their culture, and each other.

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.

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, you know, walks of life, and other people's stories.

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.

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.

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.

These workshops are able to do these things but kids can have fun while they're doing it.

[Nooky]

Those online influencers trying to fill our kids' ears with disrespectful stuff don't stand a chance against this, our voices, our culture.

So 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.