Proposed Changes To Relationships And Sexuality Education Will Put Children At Risk

The coalition agreement between National and NZ First promised to review Aotearoa’s Relationships and Sexuality Education (RSE) guidelines. This review is now coming to its end, and the public have until 11:59 pm this Friday, 9 May, to make submissions on proposed changes.

The proposed changes are disastrous and leave children at risk of abuse. The current guidelines, put in place in 2020, addressed gaps in the then-current 2007 guidelines regarding consent, online interactions, cultural differences, and diverse sexualities and genders. Although NZ First was part of the government that created the 2020 guidelines, they campaigned in 2023 on removing them as part of their pivot to a “war on woke”; Winston Peters tweeted “Why are our school children, from age five, now being taught about ‘relationships, gender, and sexuality’?” (1)

The reason children as young as 5 must be taught the importance of consent is because this is one of the most - and potentially the most - effective strategies for combating sexual abuse. Teaching children what consent is, how to recognise breaches of consent, and the fact that they have a right to autonomy and to report harm done to them, gives children the tools they need to detect when people mean to harm them, and to report this harm. We have decades of research demonstrating that sex education is a necessary and effective tool for preventing abuse. (2)

While the proposed guidelines retain mention of consent, they eliminate mention of gender diversity. This creates a dangerous gap in the curriculum in which trans, non-binary, and intersex children will not see themselves reflected in consent education, and may only be taught about consent within the confines of normative gender experiences. As members of the queer and trans communities, many of us at Queer Endurance in Defiance understand what it is like to grow up in a world that does not acknowledge your existence, knowing that our autonomy is not valued as highly as our peers’. The current government’s regressive plans for RSE put gender-diverse youth at risk by failing to acknowledge the intersection of social marginalisation and abuse. Trans, non-binary, and intersex youth are often targeted because we are seen as of lesser value, because police and courts do not care as much about our rights. Teaching gender-diverse children that they are valid and that their autonomy is just as important as anyone else’s empowers them to detect and report upon those who would harm them.

By removing reference to our existence, the government is actively putting gender-diverse children at risk of abuse. This is a deliberate choice that has been made to put children in harm’s way, and it has been done because the government does not care.

You have until just before midnight friday to submit against this plan. We recommend using the Greens’ submission guide and making your voice heard: https://action.greens.org.nz/rse_submission_guide?utm_campaign=rse_guidelines_2025

- Queer Endurance in Defiance

References:

(1): https://thespinoff.co.nz/politics/14-03-2025/schools-in-limbo-after-removal-of-relationship-and-sexuality-guidelines

(2): See K J Zwi, S R Woolfenden, D M Wheeler, T A O'brien, P Tait, K W Williams: School-based education programmes for the prevention of child sexual abuse (2007); Kerryann Walsh, Karen Zwi, Susan Woolfenden, Aron Shlonsky: School-based education programmes for the prevention of child sexual abuse (2015)

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