Government-funded and Backed Website Promotes Dangerous Acts and Gender Ideology to Teens

The Line is a government funded and promoted website that encourages 14 year olds to engage in sodomy, and spreads misinformation that traditional gender roles causes domestic violence.

A Betrayal of Trust

Imagine that your 14-year-old daughter, “Jessica”, just got home from school. You ask her how her day was, and she tells you that she has been learning about Respectful Relationships. She hands you a homework printout with links to websites on it. The first link is on youth.gov.au (the official government website for youth issues) on the Healthy Relationships and Consent page [1]. On that page, she sees that the site is promoting a page called “The Line” as a good resource to learn about consent, so she clicks on it.

As a parent, you do a quick check and see that this website is a campaign run by Our Watch, which is a government-funded organisation [2]. Its primary goal is to stop domestic violence, and as a government-funded site, you trust that it will promote healthy relationships, using an evidence-based approach in a neutral way.

The Line is endorsed by the Victorian State Curriculum on the topic of Resilience, Rights & Respectful Relationships in official materials [3].

However, a closer look at The Line shows that not only do they promote unhealthy relationships, but they also actively promote far-left gender ideology.

Promoting Unhealthy Behaviours

In one of their most notorious articles, “How do you know if you’re ready to have sex?”, The Line promotes experimenting with sodomy and homosexual relationships to children as young as 14 [4]. Never mind that the age of consent in Australia is 16-17, depending on your state or territory, but sodomy is well documented as leading to serious injuries and contracting sexually transmitted infections [5]. Encouraging teens to experiment with sodomy is not an evidence-based way of promoting healthy behaviours; it’s the opposite. The Line normalises casual sex and actively promotes hook-up culture [6]. This directly contradicts the stated goal of the organisation’s funder, as having a high number of sexual partners drastically increases the risk of contracting STIs, developing cancer and, specifically for women, a higher risk of developing a limiting long-standing illness [7].

For teenagers like Jessica, who don’t know these facts, all she sees is that these behaviours are perfectly normal. Is it right that the government is encouraging teenagers to experiment in these ways?

Also read: How the LGBT-lobby tries to influence your children

Spreading Misinformation

Not only does this government-funded website promote unhealthy behaviours, but it also actively promotes misinformation. In the article, “5 Ways To Keep Things Chill When You’re Having Sex”, again aimed at teenagers like Jessica, who are below the age of consent, they claim that, ‘No matter how you feel about condoms, they’re the safest (and cheapest) form of contraception and STI prevention.’ [8] This is false. Condoms are not cheaper or safer than abstinence. Condoms are not 100% effective in preventing STIs. A well-cited study found that condoms prevent herpes in less than 50% of cases, they only prevent syphilis 29% of the time, and they are typically ineffective against HPV transmission [9]. Abstinence, on the other hand, has a 100% prevention rate against all STIs and is completely free. But The Line would rather promote the idea that virginity is a harmful social construct than actually protect teenagers like Jessica. Why is a government-funded website encouraging teenagers to lose their virginity? [10]

Another egregious form of misinformation from the Line is that violence against women is caused by traditional gender roles.  It completely ignores the fact that women are more likely to experience violence in a lesbian relationship than in a heterosexual relationship [11]. Moreover, LGBT relationships often have higher rates of domestic violence than heterosexual relationships [12]. The idea that traditional gender roles lead to domestic violence is an ideological claim perpetuated by woke academics.

The Line uses this biased claim to teach children like Jessica that not recognising their own privilege will lead to domestic violence [13]. Of course, The Line goes even further than that, stating in its resource for educators that they should ‘acknowledge there are many more genders [than male and female]’ when discussing these issues.

How You Can Stop This

The Line is not run by the government, but it receives funding and promotion from all state governments and the federal government! The best way to stop this organisation is to tell your government that you want to stop funding it with your tax dollars. At Family in Danger we have created a petition to do exactly that. If you want to tell the government to stop funding and promoting a website that encourages 14-year-olds like Jessica to engage in sodomy and spreads dangerous misinformation, then sign the petition here.

References:

1. https://www.youth.gov.au/health-and-wellbeing/healthy-relationships-and-consent
2. https://www.ourwatch.org.au/about-us/funding-members-and-partners
3. https://arc.educationapps.vic.gov.au/d722b857-8d78-4afd-8519-2bc7801d5590/RRRRIntro.pdf.rsf, p.12.
4. https://www.theline.org.au/sex/how-to-know-if-youre-ready-for-sex/
5. https://www.theguardian.com/society/2022/aug/11/rise-in-popularity-of-anal-sex-has-led-to-health-problems-for-women
6. https://www.theline.org.au/sex/how-to-talk-about-sex/
7. https://srh.bmj.com/content/46/2/100
8. https://www.theline.org.au/sex/pressure-for-sex-5-great-ways-to-screw-it-all-up/
9. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4660551/
10. https://www.theline.org.au/sex/does-losing-your-virginity-actually-matter/
11. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6113571/
12. Ibid.
13. https://www.theline.org.au/gender-inequality-power-and-privilege/, https://www.theline.org.au/exploring-power-and-privilege/