Dr. P?draig MacNeela:

We thank committee members for the opportunity to speak. Since 2013, the active consent programme at the University of Galway has pioneered sexual consent education and research with young people throughout Ireland. It has grown into an a national programme over that time. We use surveys, campaigns, resources, workshops, theatre and training to prompt institutional innovations, with the aim that young people will achieve what we call "consent literacy". It would be great to talk to the committee about that concept today. Essentially we are talking about people having a good level of knowledge within themselves of the concepts, and good information about what their peers are thinking. There is a lot of misinformation out there. Also, that people feel they can communicate with their partners and their peers their preferences - what they want to do or do not what to do. That they are able to support their peers as well should they need help or assistance and that they can seek help themselves should they need it. Also, that they can challenge attitudes and actions that they know are inconsistent with the principles of respect, similar to our colleagues here from UCC.

One of the most important learnings in the past decade is that achieving the goal of consent education for young people is sustainable only when seen as a programme of culture change. That is really important. That means that successful outreach and support on a large scale must be matched by capacity building, institutional ownership, and policy that drives consistent implementation. We recognise the potential that now exists for transformative change in this space in how the education sector responds in the areas of consent, sexual violence, and harassment. The work completed by ourselves and other colleagues in national programmes such as Consent Ed and by our colleagues at UCC and others has established an extensive base of research and practice. The building blocks are in place. More recent changes in the junior and senior cycle social, personal and health education, SPHE, requirements, the acceptance that systems change is required to address areas such as bullying and mental health combine with these innovations and practice to provide the opportunity for action. There is now an essential moment in which we can take action.

The context for this is the mounting evidence of the scale of sexual violence and harassment being experienced by our young people today. It demands a strong national response on prevention and support. That is why we made the four key recommendations that the committee has seen in our written submission. We want straightforward guidance and resources for school communities that enable them to benchmark themselves. It is really important for schools to know what they should be doing. We believe we should have a benchmark of the key components of a whole school approach in order that they can identify and then address gaps through devising a local action plan. That action plan, similar to what the committee recommended for anti-bullying strategies, refers to policies, infrastructure, adoption of curriculum, support for professional development for educators and so on.

Our second recommendation is to engage the principles that are driving innovative work on anti-bullying and mental health, to introduce strategies whereby the Department of Education is taking a monitoring role and is able to assess the uptake of these standards. We have seen in higher education the role of the Ministry in that case as being essential in driving the implementation.

We also have to provide mechanisms for staff in post-primary schools and in further education and higher education to access training and resources, thereby setting an agreed standard of professional competency in this area. We have seen a lot of commitment and interest and individual passion in this area and we now need to follow that up with national standards in order that we can build capacity and have agreement about what is required.

Then we also have the opportunity to have full integration and for Ireland to be a world leader in this area where young people would have a seamless curriculum in post-primary education, further education and higher education, encountered in a developmentally coherent way such that individuals and communities can learn about respect and mutual support all the way from early adolescence to adulthood.

We are coming from a position of experience in this area. Over the past decade, our team has drawn on a diverse range of disciplines, including psychology, health promotion, theatre and psychotherapy. To finish, I will highlight a little bit about this work so the committee can get to know us a little better. Since 2015, we have had a continuous series of primary research reports and then studies that have evaluated and explored the impact of our programming. We are an evidence-based programme. We are based in a university and are grounded in the communities around us. Since 2020 alone, we have published a sexual experiences survey, a toolkit for higher education, the active consent for school communities report, and a review of the active consent programme impact earlier this year. In August of this year, with one of our colleagues, Dr. Kate Dawson at the University of Greenwich, we co-authored one of the first reports on teacher-perpetrated sexual harassment, which is indicative of the way we keep driving forward on new areas of knowledge. We will shortly publish a report on our live drama production that toured colleges and schools with a further outreach to schools planned for early 2024. This year alone, our research team has published in three international peer-reviewed journals, namely, Violence Against Women;Sexuality & Culture, and the Journal of Sexual Aggression. All of our reports are available on consenthub.ie. It is a national resource that also hosts practical information for young people and parents and offers professionals free access to learning resources to support their practice in classrooms and colleges.

That ethos of openness and sharing is critical. In the submission we made to the joint committee the closer partnership we have with the Galway Rape Crisis Centre can be seen, as well as with post-primary and further and higher education institutions, and others. For example, we evaluated the senior cycle Manuela programme, which was supported by Tusla, the Department of Justice, and Rape Crisis Centres nationally. We also evaluated the follow-on programme, Consent Ed, initiating a partnership we both expect to deepen and to create a leading national collaboration from next year onwards. Members of our team also completed reports for the Higher Education Authority, HEA, in 2021 on the national surveys of staff and students in higher education on attitudes, awareness, culture change, sexual violence experiences and sexual harassment. We are coming from that position of research, knowledge and sharing that information at all times.

In the case of the HEA reports, that work was important to provide an information base for the implementation plan that was adopted by the HEA centre for excellence for equality, diversity and inclusion. We have learned that this type of information and the findings we have disseminated may make for uncomfortable reading but it is a vital ingredient of long-term culture change and that is a key reason we recommend that schools are supported with bespoke tools and training for that purpose to bring them up to speed too. We see an awful lot of passion and commitment in the classroom from teachers but the systems change and the ability to reflect and self-reflect at school level is vital and there is a gap.

At the same time, Ireland is an international leader and building the capacity for consent education as a response to the issue of sexual violence is clearly relevant beyond Ireland.

The active consent programme increasingly recognises the commonality shared with education systems in other countries and sees how this can lead to mutual benefit and reciprocal exchanges. We are, therefore, involved in this in the COSHARE project, which is an all-island project with the University of Ulster and last month, at the University of Galway, we hosted an inaugural meeting of an international network of consent researchers and practitioners from the US, Canada, the UK and New Zealand. Our intention is to have an international consent curriculum where Ireland learns from the best and delivers back out internationally.

To conclude, we see a unique transformative opportunity to bring together recent innovations in practice which we have described from our programme and from our colleagues, and policy which is now emerging as a very clear pathway. This is best supported by active collaboration between all those interested in researching, responding, teaching and leading in this area. It must be guided by joined-up national guidelines that provide clear expectations and requirements of our educational institutions, whether they are the large institutions at the university level or small schools locally. It must also be met by resources of time and funding which are required to enable the sector to respond. We look to the future with hope in this sense, while also recognising the scale of the challenges associated with consent, sexual violence and harassment. I thank the committee.