Awareness raising of domestic and sexual violence: a survey of post-primary schools in Ireland.

In order to inform the development and implementation of the National Strategy on Domestic, Sexual and Gender-based Violence 2010 – 2014, and to address the lack of any systematic collection of information on school activities on raising awareness of domestic and sexual violence, an overview was needed of the current situation with regard to post-primary schools' activities in Ireland in relation to such awareness raising. Cosc undertook a survey of awareness raising of domestic and sexual violence in post-primary schools in Ireland in 2008. The aim of the survey was to describe the extent to which school-based programmes raise awareness of domestic and sexual violence, how well the programmes cover such violence and the factors involved. This report gives the results of this survey and addresses the following questions. A. Do schools find school-based programmes such as Social, Personal and Health Education (SPHE)11 help to raise awareness of domestic and sexual violence? • Does this depend on the school's particular circumstances (e.g. the size of the school, location, denomination involved, school type, etc)? • Is this facilitated by factors such as contact with SPHE Support Services and the importance the school attaches to areas such as SPHE in general? B. Do schools use outside facilitators to raise awareness of domestic and sexual violence? The report is based on a representative sample of post-primary schools and the data were collected by computer aided telephone interviewing in 2009