Dr. Clíona Saidléar:

I want to pull together some threads, starting with Deputy Funchion's question about teachers. What is coming through is that there is something about the specialisation and professionalisation of this role in terms of sexual health. We know from our work that there are transferable and generalisable, mainstreamable tools that we can give teachers. However, as Ms Haslam has said, we renew and review the content of that curriculum very regularly. We talk about ethos and objective in very particular ways in this debate but one thing we really need to grapple with is that once we get beyond a certain basic level of facts, we are dealing with culture. We are engaging with and asking questions of culture and therefore we have to keep up to date with that, in terms of being led by the children's needs and their lived realities. To do that, we need someone in place who has a specialisation and is supported within a structure. I am inclining more towards the Department of Education and Skills having a set of professionals in this area who have standing, status and support and who are able to carry out that continual review because they are all the time upskilling and learning from the children they are engaging with. We really have to be aware that we are dealing with culture here and with equipping and upskilling children to get through the ever-changing challenges they are facing.

The rape crisis centres were mentioned. In terms of infrastructure, there is no funding stream for the 16 rape crisis centres around the country to draw on to do the primary prevention work in schools. A lot of them find ways to do it but they do not have any funding. Rape Crisis Network Ireland has no funding to do this work or this thinking. The bank of personnel and the resources must be there. There must be some part of government that is watchful, mindful and responsible for this and that has cross-departmental, whole-of-government capacity and authority. In the absence of these things, I wonder about what falls through the cracks. We end up developing a set of tools that go out of date and nobody is keeping an eye on the situation.

On the question of uncomfortableness around this issue, sexual violence prevention has had a hard time getting onto the sexual health agenda and curriculum. One of the reasons, which we address head on, for example in the REAL U programme, is that there is confusion about role. We have to ask ourselves why we do not have a sexual harassment policy for our schools. It is a glaring gap that nobody is asking about. There are lots of reasons for this, one of which is that we move into the criminal sphere very quickly when we talk about sexual violence. That is why I emphasised primary and secondary prevention. If we are to build up a bank of professionals around primary prevention, this educational piece, we will need to be very clear to them that they are not investigators, that the child protection and children first aspects of the responsibility of the schools happens elsewhere and they are not going to be doing that work as well. We need to distinguish those two roles very clearly.