We need to find a better way to talk to our children about sex
COLUMNIST
PASS it around and have a good look. Biology C on a Monday morning had never been so exciting.
A lady from family planning had arrived with giant versions of contraception to show us what this sex thing was all about.
We’d reached the magic age of 13 and it was the late 1970s, so we could move on from the science class where we’d been shown tasteful line drawings of men and women without their clothes on and a bunch of arrows and squiggles directing us to look at what their body parts did and how.
We’d graduated to the comedy act involving outsize examples of contraception that we could look at and touch. The contraceptive cap the size of a dinner plate drew gasps of “ouch” from the girls while the boys wondered if they would ever measure up when asked to fit a condom over an alarming sculpture in bubblegum pink.
Even though we weren’t yet making babies, we mostly all knew someone who was and had a pretty good idea of the necessary ingredients and how to mix them. Outside class we’d all shrieked with laughter filling up a condom with water and throwing stones at it until it burst.
We all knew someone who knew someone whose older brother or sister had done IT.
What we didn’t know – and were not told – was all the other stuff – how to negotiate your way out of a situation that was moving too fast, how to say No and how boys need to know all this stuff, too, and can be just as ignorant and sensitive as girls.
And if you were gay or confused about your sexuality that was too bad. The lady from family planning didn’t cover all bases. You’d have to hunt out your own information – not an easy thing to do in pre-internet days. But again, everyone knew someone, who knew someone whose sister had kissed a girl and liked it.
Fast forward 40 years and the earth hasn’t moved. Incredibly, in the 21st century in Wales parents can remove their children from sex education classes. Two plus two may equal three (or twins) but sex ed is not a right at school the way that maths is.
Those who are permitted to learn about sex at school will sit through classes delivered to varying degrees of efficiency by teachers ill-equipped and often untrained, according to a report just published by an expert panel advising Welsh Government.
For a country that was (and may still be) the teenage pregnancy capital of Europe, it is incredible we have taken so long to grasp the bull by the horns and reform the way we teach our kids about sex.
How slow can our education system be to catch up with the fact that young people live in a digital world where they can get information on everything from football scores to porn as soon as they learn how to access Google? They need to find out how to deal with that information.
Gone are the days when we can hope to be their main influence or halt the flow of alleged facts, often from dubious sources.
The genie is out of the bottle. From the moment they are born our kids live in a world where information from all sorts of sources is there at the touch of a button.
They need more than the facts of life, reproduction and sex. In a world where sex is thrust at them from every angle online, in advertising, music and entertainment, they need to know how to navigate it.
Long overdue, our government is finally taking a look at this. Wales’ new curriculum would be nothing without the best quality sex education raised to a compulsory status in the classroom.
Education Secretary Kirsty Williams set up the Relationships Education Expert Panel, chaired by Professor Emma Renold, at Cardiff University, which has investigated how sex education is taught in schools and delivered its first report last week.
The panel says sex education in schools should be more about rights than biology and should be assessed and compulsory by law for pupils to attend.
Someone in the world of education has finally said what most sensible parents and children have long known – sex ed in school is mostly a bit rubbish.
How can we begin to tackle issues like sexual violence, unwanted pregnancy, homophobia and sexually transmitted disease – to name but a few – without giving all our children accurate, high quality and diverse sex education?
It is anachronistic to permit parents to deny their children this vital part of their education. Good sex education for all pupils should be a right and is definitely a necessity for a functioning society.
It’s not a cure-all, but it would go a long way to dealing with some of the prejudice and ignorance surrounding sex and relationships that is apparent in children as young as primary school age,
If schools can get this right parents might get better at it, too. We can’t expect teachers to do everything. It is a parent or carers’ duty to talk to their children about sex and all the issues surrounding it. And this should start before school age in some form.
It’s no use waiting until you catch the kids looking at porn under the duvet or finding a pack of condoms in their school bag.
“Where did I come from” and “how did the baby get in your tummy?” are common questions from toddlers, many of whom spend their days with babies or pregnant women.
Information and discussion has to be age-appropriate. But if we don’t all learn to talk about sex to our kids someone else will. And that someone else may not be very nice. You only need to go online to find that out.