Updated sex ed will be good for kids and adults
The two Toronto Catholic school trustees who tried and failed to get Ontario’s new sex-education curriculum delayed for a year are people lumbering out of the past.
Angela Kennedy of East York and Garry Tanuan of Scarborough, who also opposed gay-straight student alliances, don’t appear to realize why students need a range of knowledge about sexual matters. They (the trustees) are innocents.
“If it’s wrong for Catholic kids, then it’s wrong for all kids,” they say of sex ed.
What a peculiar flag to wrap oneself in. Sex education is good for all kids, but may I say it’s good for adults too.
The Catholic Church has a particular history when it comes to institutionalized sexual abuse. One would think Catholic trustees would welcome light and sunshine, if only out of sheer embarrassment. The classes will help children fend off damaged adults.
The updated sex-ed program simply gives children the facts, as well as teaching about sexting, cyberbullying, healthy relationships and, most important, consent, as the Star’s Louise Brown wrote crisply on Thursday. Parents can pull their own kids out of class; it’s disgraceful to see protesters insist that everyone’s children be kept vulnerable.
According to the trustees, “Catholic schools shouldn’t be forced to teach a program that doesn’t ground the expression of sexuality in love and marriage.”
Well, the Catholic Church shouldn’t have let nuns and priests have their sexual way with children, but it happened. It happens most easily in institutions — schools, churches, jails — where adults are left unsupervised.
I was unhappy to see a handful of Muslim parents being encouraged — and fed untruths — by the Christian right to oppose sex ed.
It made Muslim parents stand out among the clueless parents who oppose sex ed, which is unfair.
I was even more distressed by having read Instrumental, a new memoir by British classical pianist James Rhodes, now 40. At age 5, Rhodes, a “beautiful little boy, darkhaired and lithe, with a winning smile” arrived at Arnold House, a St. John’s Wood prep school that still serves the offspring of the rich.
The description comes from a 2010 statement to police by a woman who taught the youngest boys in the ’80s. She saw terrible things but was too timid — as unknowing as a Jimmy Savile victim — to realize they were sexual. Rhodes was being groomed by the school boxing coach, Peter Lee, a burly man in his late 40s.
Rhodes, still tiny, began begging her to stay with him in gym. After he came back to her classroom with a bloody face, she complained to the headmaster, who said “little Rhodes needed toughening up.” She described finding Rhodes sobbing, begging not to be sent back to gym. He had blood on his little legs. Lee, 40, spent five years sodomizing Rhodes and torturing him to the point where the boy nearly lost his sanity and would eventually require spinal surgery. Rhodes was broken. The tale of his suffering as an adult — obsessive-compulsive disorder, depression, suicide attempts, selfharm with razors, drugs and booze, post-traumatic stress disorder and more — is almost intolerable to read.
The teacher, decades too late, told police she feared Lee would attack other children. They found him. He was living in a seaside town teaching boxing to boys under 10. He had spent 50 years coaching boys.
Lee was charged with 10 counts of buggery and indecent assault and died soon after. He was buried with great honour and ceremony. The boxing club’s gym would be named after him. Pedophiles often get plaques, I notice.
Under the Ontario curriculum, Ontario schoolchildren between ages 5 and 10 will learn the things that just might stop them becoming victims of a Peter Lee. Between pages 79 and 145, it’s all there.
In Grades 1 to 3, they’re taught about enjoying physical activity, acquiring coping skills and, crucially, the naming of body parts. “Why is it important to know?” the Grade 1 teacher asks on page 93. “If I’m hurt or need help, I need to know the right words,” the child learns.
In Grade 3, they learn the difference between cartoons and real violence. In Grade 4, it’s personal space (skipping ropes are big) and the approach of puberty and its hygiene requirements (wash).
In Grade 5, they learn what to do about violence. “If you’re being bullied, to whom can you turn for help?” the teacher asks. “I can turn to any adult I trust,” the child learns. “I need to continue to ask for help to get the help I need.”
Here’s the weird part. Sex ed might not have saved Rhodes (in Grade 5, he’d have learned to ask his coach for help). But it would have alerted the headmaster, teachers and his mother to study adults closely.
Parents, the new sex-ed curriculum is for you. But it’s not about you, it’s about your children. There is always a specific explanation for a child’s terror, spilled blood or indeed skeletal damage (Rhodes’ surgeons never asked).
The parents protesting the new curriculum have been implored to read it instead of false versions sent out by false Christians and the hard right. But the two trustees? I’d ask them to read Rhodes’ memoir. hmallick@thestar.ca