On Thursday July 26 our Year 12 students participated in the Loves Me Not Workshop. This is supported by the New Zealand Police and the Sophie Elliot Foundation.

The students were divided into 8 groups for the day and each group were matched with 3 facilitators (one teacher from our school, a Police Officer and a community sector specialist in youth health).

It was a big day with lots of discussion, role playing, critical thinking and problem solving around healthy and unhealthy relationships. The key topics were:

· Identifying and aspiring to great relationships

· Recognizing when things aren’t going right

· Identifying societal mores that perpetuate abusive behaviours in relationships

· Understanding the law in relation to sexual consent

· Developing skills to deal with negative, unhealthy or abusive behavior

The following was written by two year 12 students reflecting their opinion of the day.

The workshop began with a video of Leslie Elliot, mother of Sophie Elliot who unfortunately suffered fatal consequences of an unhealthy relationship.

The seminar continued by analyzing the often-difficult subjects of relationship abuse and consent, helping the students to understand the signs of a healthy or an unhealthy relationship in hope to prevent abusive behaviour.

The workshop is something that not only year 12 women should be learning about but those who are older, younger and male.

Personally, we found the workshop extremely eye opening, we learnt about many unhealthy aspects of relationships that we never knew existed, as did many others within year 12. Overall our experience within this seminar was very inspirational and informative therefore we want other women to have the opportunity to be involved in this experience.