Meeting Summary
The first LMF Network meeting of 2025 focused on one of the most pressing issues facing Catholic schools: the Australian federal government’s mandate requiring consent education to be taught in every Australian school from Kindergarten to Year 12. Karen Doyle traced how this came about — activist Chanel Contos posted a question on Instagram in 2021 asking if friends had experienced sexual assault from boys at Sydney private schools. Within 24 hours, 204 of 300 followers responded yes. Within three weeks, 6,000 testimonies were collected and a petition gathered 45,000 signatures. A year later, education ministers across Australia mandated consent education nationally.
Karen was direct about the underlying cause: pornography. She described it as “the new sex education curriculum” — citing two confronting real-world stories of young people whose understanding of sex had been entirely formed by what they’d watched online. Her argument was that consent education without addressing pornography’s role is treating symptoms without naming the disease. She also flagged the legal shift underway, with affirmative consent laws now in place across four states and one territory, requiring active ongoing mutual communication — not just the absence of a “no” — which she noted has implications for marriage ministry as well.
Rather than framing the mandate as a threat, Karen urged the network to see it as an opportunity to reclaim ground. She described three common failure modes among Catholic school leaders — ignoring the issue, overreacting, or abdicating the space out of fear — and argued that all three let secular ideology fill the void. Her response is Live Life to the Full, a K–12 Catholic consent education program endorsed by the bishops, aligned with government curriculum requirements, and built on a whole-school model covering staff formation, parent resources, and classroom content.
About the Presenter
Karen Doyle is the founding director of Choicez Media, Australia’s largest provider of values and faith-based resources for schools in the areas of relationships and sexuality formation. A former nurse with postgraduate studies in marriage and family, she has spent over 21 years developing curriculum programs used by hundreds of schools across Australia and internationally. She developed Live Life to the Full — a bishops-endorsed K–12 Catholic consent education program — in direct response to the federal government’s consent education mandate. The program’s website is catholicconsent.com.
Key Takeaways
- Consent education is now legally mandated K–12 in every Australian school — the option to avoid or delay no longer exists for Catholic school leaders. The question is only how to engage well, not whether to engage.
- Pornography is the unacknowledged driver behind the consent crisis. Karen argued that any serious Catholic response must name this directly rather than treating consent education as a standalone issue.
- Affirmative consent laws — requiring active, ongoing, mutual communication throughout a sexual encounter — are now in force across most of Australia, with the remaining states moving to adopt them. Karen flagged this will have implications for how marriage preparation programs discuss conjugal intimacy.
- The Catholic vision of consent is richer than the secular legal minimum. Rather than consent as a threshold (“did they say yes?”), Catholic anthropology offers a compelling framework of dignity, virtue, and human flourishing — one Karen described as genuinely attractive to young people when presented as an invitation rather than a rule.
- Effective implementation requires a whole-school approach: staff need accredited formation so they aren’t sourcing random internet resources; parents need to be actively re-engaged as primary educators; and the classroom curriculum needs to be coherent from K–12. Live Life to the Full is designed to address all three.
