Letter to Minister Stanford – RSE Guidelines

Hon. Erica Stanford
Minister of Education
E.Stanford@ministers.govt.nz

 

17 March 2025

 

Tēnā koe Minister Stanford,

I write on behalf of Auckland Women’s Centre to join our concerns to those of Sexual Wellbeing Aotearoa and the Mental Health Foundation regarding the removal of the Relationships and Sexuality Education Guidelines from the Ministry of Education website.

Ultimately, the current guidelines help to prevent gender violence, and we are highly concerned they are no longer accessible.

Gender violence is endemic in this country – for example, the NZ Crimes & Victims Survey shows around a third of women in Aotearoa New Zealand have experienced sexual violence (Ministry of Justice, 2019, p.82), and more will have experienced other forms of intimate partner violence. The guidelines assist in a generational approach to reduce this horrific burden.

We urge you to reinstate access to the current guidelines, while their review and refresh is underway.

Education and violence prevention experts over the years have told us the guidelines are generally useful and positive; that they help schools understand how to promote healthy relationships among rangatahi and young people, and how to increase respect for difference, which makes gender violence less likely.

In your maiden speech you included a perceptive and positive assessment of where we were in 2017: “I love seeing the world through my children’s eyes. I love seeing how ‘normal’ can change so much from one generation to the next. It will be normal for my children to have a young female Prime Minister. It’ll be normal for them to have their marriages defined by love and not by gender.”

We urge you not to consign those ideas to the past.

Removing the guidelines – a violence prevention tool – without replacement is a move against all women, trans and cis. We urge you to immediately reinstate access to the Relationships and Sexuality Education Guidelines to promote respect for women and people of all genders and sexualities.

 

Ngā mihi nui

Maia Hall
Centre Manager
programmes@womenz.org.nz