To bring home to young children the message that domestic and family violence is not acceptable, teachers at Maitland Community Preschool arranged a meeting around a tree decked with white ribbons on Friday to recognise White Ribbon Day.
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Parents from the school were invited to share this important message with the youngsters too.
“We decided that as a preschool, we need to support White Ribbon Day and the movement against domestic violence,” director Megan Silis said.
“Our school has around 100 children a week coming in and we thought it would be really good to get the White Ribbon Day message across to them when they were young.
“We have many families bringing their children to our school and we put up a tree for people to tie white ribbons to the branches.
“We also asked parents to tie white ribbons onto our tree and they were talking to children about White Ribbon Day and how domestic violence was unacceptable.”
Ms Silis said staff had been concerned about the high statistics for domestic violence in the Hunter.
The Central Hunter Local Area Command consistently ranks in the top 10 of the state for the most incidents of domestic violence.
“While we wanted to be proactive, we also stressed to children that domestic violence did not only concern men and boys assaulting girls and women – but that females perpetrators were also responsible in many cases,” she said.
“We reinforced the message that it is never OK to hurt someone you love.
“It was really encouraging to see parents talking to the youngsters about this and we thought it was an important step in helping to break this in our society.”
