AN interactive theatre project teaching local students about family violence won an award at the 2024 Australian Crime and Violence Prevention Awards last week. The “This is not who I want to be” interactive theatre project is run by the Peninsula Community Legal Centre. The program for secondary students covers family violence and forced marriage.
Peninsula Community Legal Centre CEO Jackie Galloway said the theatre project was created in response to “data showing that teenage girls were already experiencing controlling relationships and family violence, and that some were going on to forced marriages after leaving school.”
“The number of young people affected by family violence within our community is way too high,” Galloway said. “We wanted to find creative new ways to address this problem by educating young people about the underlying attitudes that support violence and to give them tools to question this. By using theatre performance with professional actors to tell the story about the impacts of family violence and forced marriage on a family, we have successfully educated teenagers that may experience these controlling situations. This knowledge and these tools will allow them to shape a different future.”
The program has been running at schools in the Casey municipality. A funding injection from Victorian Legal Services Board will see it extended to secondary schools in the Frankston and Mornington Peninsula local government areas soon. “With this new funding, we will be able to develop the program so that the theatre performances can reach more students in more schools and cover additional forms of violence and crime affecting young people,” Galloway said.
“We know from our youth law work that many young people are involved in experiencing as well as perpetuating violence. Data from the Victorian Crimes Statistics Agency for 2023 indicates that crimes committed by minors across the state have reached a nine-year high. More needs to be done to educate young people about their rights and responsibilities, and to give them the tools to resist peer pressure and other negative influences which support violent behaviour that are reaching them through social media.”
Last week the theatre program won the bronze award in the community-led category at the 2024 Australian Crime and Violence Prevention Awards. The award was handed out by Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus.
The Frankston-based PCLC offers free legal services. To contact PCLC call 9783 3600 or email pclc@pclc.org.au
First published in the Frankston Times – 26 November 2024