Let’s skip the consent lessons for fouryear-olds

The closest relationship my little girl had was with a rabbit called Doodoo

Did you ever see the old police video about how giving consent is like a cup of tea? Because, apparently, tea – whether you want it or not and, if you don’t, might you actually still drink it if it were brewed to perfection and placed in front of you? – was the perfect euphemism for sex. The video was deemed so successful that Thames Valley Police began using it again in 2015, when it promptly went viral – and was predictably ridiculed around the world.

Now, teachers face an even tougher task: to simplify the incredibly complex issue of consent… for an audience of four-year-olds. The Department for Education has deemed four a good age to start having “consent classes” or “new relationship classes”.

Never mind that the closest relationship my daughter had at four involved a one-legged rabbit named Doodoo, with the rise of sexual assault as horrifying as it is (30,000 reported cases of children sexually assaulting other youngsters last year alone, with 2,625 of alleged attacks taking place on school premises), primary and secondary schools across England have been forced to take action. And what better kind is there than the panicked, the ill-thought-out and the knee-jerk?

Parents needn’t worry, though: the “building blocks” or “concepts” of consent will be taught in an “ageappropriate” way. This would be reassuring if the only age-appropriate way to teach a four-year-old about sex and sexual boundaries was not to.

Pre-teens may be up against a whole new set of cultural and societal pressures, but unless they’ve been inappropriately exposed to those pressures by their parents (remember them?), four-year-olds are surely much the same as they were 20 years ago.

So it might be an idea to wait until they can pronounce the word “consent” before attempting to teach it as a life skill.

The problem with panicked, outsized reactions is that the good is buried (usually with derision) along with the bad.

Of course, Damian Hinds, the Education Secretary, is right to say how vital it is “that every child knows about their rights and that nothing should happen to them without their consent”.

Of course, childhood ends far sooner than it used to, and, of course, secondary school pupils should study the theory of consent along with the laws on sexual abuse, grooming, and how to deal with online peer pressure.

All of those things are unpleasant

realities that we may not have had to deal with, but our pre-teen children do. And in that respect, the Department for Education’s initiative is as necessary and well-intentioned as those cautionary videos I remember from school (usually starring some actor so down on his luck that when his agent rang to ask “Would you be up for playing some weirdo in a mac loitering around a playground?”, they jumped at the chance).

But those videos featured villains with a capital V: hook-nosed and curly black-moustached deviants who could be instantly identified by their deep, throaty chuckles. Today, boys and girls are each others’ villains. Although the truth is that consent is rarely about good versus evil, and almost always about nuance.

I’m not suggesting that we shouldn’t bother trying to teach youngsters about the basic precepts of consent, but we’re not yet robots, which is why any kind of enforced robotic rationalising of human emotions will never work.

The consent-by-click market may be booming in the US, where digital solutions to an age-old problem have been offered up with apps like We-consent and Legalfling, where partners check the “yes” box when they have agreed to sex, but all that’s just gimmickry.

To a certain extent, the teaching of consent to four-year-olds is a different form of gimmickry. Because – look! – got your attention, didn’t I? And that must mean we’re taking the situation very seriously.

If parents are going to rise up against the idea, then they must be the kind of parents who don’t believe in outsourcing every difficult discussion to an amorphous entity such as the education system.

After all, no government body, school or teacher can possibly understand where our individual children are in terms of their personal and sexual development as well as their parents can.

The problem with this particular issue is that adults are as much in the dark as to how best to deal with it as are children.