Youth Voice Isn’t Optional – It’s Essential
For the past few years, I’ve been involved in delivering and designing healthy relationship education programmes in high schools. The design process usually looks like the following: a group of adults sitting around a table trying to decide what young people need. We brainstorm, plan, deliver, feedback as adults on what it was like to deliver […]
Why Sexual Violence Must Remain Explicit in Primary Prevention
Why Sexual Violence Must Remain Explicit in Primary Prevention Most primary-prevention frameworks (e.g., CDC’s Spectrum of Prevention, the Social Ecological Model, and ACC’s Protective Factors approach) are structured linearly, from upstream drivers to downstream outcomes.But sexual violence sits within a complex relational ecosystem, where individual, interpersonal, institutional, and cultural dynamics constantly interact.Unlike linear health-promotion models […]
Community-Led Systems Change: Co-Authoring Generational Transformation
Bringing together systems change and community-led into prevention work is innovative and needed. In that, it’s important to consider when co-authoring systems change, it means moving from a model of doing for communities to doing with them. It’s about recognising that communities already hold deep systems knowledge, insight that comes from lived experience, connection to […]
Young People Deserve More Than Consent Talks
Building a Culture of Safety That Starts Before the Classroom Consent education is a necessary part of the puzzle—but on its own, it’s not enough. Every year, young people across Aotearoa are given messages about consent, respect, and boundaries—usually as part of a one-off school session or health curriculum. And while those sessions can spark […]
Systems Are Not Enough
Prevention That Begins With the People, Not Just the Policy Aotearoa has invested heavily in strategies to reduce sexual harm and family violence. There are action plans, funding initiatives, training programmes, and service providers doing critical work across the motu. And yet, the rates of harm remain unacceptably high. At Hikitia!, we’ve asked ourselves the […]
Why Community Holds the Answer
Shifting Power to Prevent Harm from the Inside Out Too often, when people talk about preventing sexual harm and family violence, the conversation jumps straight to services, programmes, or interventions. While these are all important pieces of the puzzle, they’re not the full picture. At Hikitia!, we believe that meaningful prevention begins not with the […]