Our current education model is missing the opportunity to implement primary intervention and prevention strategies to protect teenagers against abuse. Drawing on lived experience of a toxic family, intergenerational abuse and intimate partner abuse, the program is designed to combine real-life stories with concrete strategies to transform the toxic. Teen Spirit is a non-religious relationships-focussed approach, designed to motivate teenagers to grow non-physical skills such as confidence, courage and creativity. Using storytelling, the program details empirical examples of how poor self-worth and exposure to toxic relationships has the potential to make an individual abuse-available during adulthood.

Research demonstrates a strong correlation between poor self-esteem, previous exposure to domestic violence and the statistical likelihood of becoming a future victim. Adolescence, a time of fundamental identity formation, is the ideal intervention point to support students to become empowered. Currently our education system priorities subjects that can be metrically measured, which has revealed an urgent need for programs that target the ‘invisible’ topics such as power, self-worth and the human spirit.

Teen Spirit Educations aims to:

• Empower teens to understand the link between identity and positive relationships. Students learn how identity is shaped and how it can be changed.
• Show how self-love can be learnt like any other skill. Students learn how to self-code beliefs that promote self-worth as proactive protection.
• Equip teens with an understanding that abuse can take many forms. Using personal anecdotes students learn that abuse is just as likely to come from a machine operator as a school teacher and that it can cross gender lines. Importantly, students are taught to reject the ‘no blood no bother’ approach and understand that abuse includes non-physical tactics such as emotional manipulation and psychological harm.