Why Love Bites?

NAPCAN‘s Love Bites program aims to provide young people with a safe environment to examine, discuss and explore respectful relationships.

All Love Bites programming takes a strength based approach and views young people as active participants who are able to make choices for themselves and their relationships. When supported with information and opportunity for skill development, young people thrive.

Primary prevention and cultural change

Respectful relationships education for young people is the key to sustained cultural change to reduce violence for the current generation, and future generations as well.

Love Bites is designed for all children and young people, and acts as a linchpin for whole-of-school and whole-of-community approaches to prevention of domestic, family and sexual violence.

Youth-led

Young people have informed NAPCAN’s respectful relationship education programs and continue to do so via feedback and consultation.

95% of young people who have completed the program say they learned something new, 75% rated the program as good and said it relates to the real world.

“The Love Bites program is life changing. It is equipping this generation of youth with the knowledge and skills to make well-informed decisions about their safety and preparing them to choose healthy relationships.”

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Having conversations, not just delivering content

The range of activities in the Love Bites program keep the young people thinking, moving and engaged (including small group discussions, participant activities, videos, and scenarios).

Love Bites is not about teaching; it’s about facilitating conversations with young people.

Facilitators link to the local community

Love Bites is unique in that it is delivered by facilitators from outside of the school.

This builds valuable relationships between young people and the services in their community including:

Police, domestic violence services, sexual assault services, youth services, family support, First Nations
services and more.

Flexible delivery

NAPCAN appreciates that schools have many competing demands and levels of capacity to implement respectful relationship education.

Therefore, Love Bites allows for flexibility in that it has been adapted to be delivered as either a full day workshop or as weekly sessions over the school term. Respectful relationships messaging can be built upon over the years and can be delivered in accordance with the readiness of the young people.

Adaptable content

While the core components of Love Bites are used successfully across a range of communities, over the years NAPCAN has worked with communities to adapt the program for young people from First Nations, LGBTIQA+, and Culturally and Linguistically Diverse (CALD) communities.

The program includes a range of activity choices so there is always flexibility to use the ones that work best for you and your school community.