Educate our children about gender equality

MY only experience of what loosely could be termed sex education was watching a fly-on-the-wall documentary about childbirth, featuring rather too many close-ups for my taste. As I peered through outstretched fingers at the horror story unfolding on the screen, I remember hearing the heavy thud of a classmate, fainting onto the floor beside me. In the normal course of events we would have rushed to help our stricken friend, but the strained atmosphere meant that the poor girl remained prostrate until a teacher ran to her rescue and brought her to her feet.

Perhaps our collective squeamishness put the nuns off making further forays into the mysteries of adult life, or maybe that was the sum of the sex education department’s resources.

In any event, that was it. As far as the education system was concerned, apart from the few morsels we picked up in religion or biology, we left school in more or less the same state of blissful ignorance as we had arrived.

Of course one might argue that the shroud of silence was a reflection of more innocent times.

But the ’70s and early ’80s weren’t innocent, not really.

Children were openly beaten by teachers; behind the scenes, sex abuse by authority figures was common, while if you travelled on the upper deck of a bus, there was a strong chance of a dirty old man sitting down beside you and pulling down his flies.

No one batted an eyelid at a racist or sexist joke. Some of the most popular TV shows were laced with homophobic humour. Life is better now, even if the MeToo movement, not to mention the vile WhatsApp messages featured during the Belfast rape case, show that beneath the veneer of tolerance, sexual harassment, male aggression and misogyny are still potent forces in society.

The prevalence of internet pornography has led to discussions about a modern rape culture, unlike anything we have seen before and based on unrealistic expectations of sex and a rise in male violence.

With that in mind Education Minister Richard Bruton has ordered a review of the Relationship and Sexuality Education programme in schools because he says, ‘the needs of young people today face a range of different issues to those faced by young people in the late 1990s’.

Top of the list of potential changes are lessons in ‘consent’.

Consent is quite the buzz word these days and while to my mind its meaning seems pretty selfexplanatory, the commentary around it suggests otherwise.

In the aftermath of the Belfast rape trial, experts talked about ‘understanding’ consent as if it was something more than a basic sign of human decency.

The impression has been created that it’s some sort of magic bullet or breakthrough to keep youngsters, especially women, safe during casual sex. But the danger is that consent may become a proxy for equality, which is what’s really at the heart of MeToo!, the Belfast rape case and, indeed, the ongoing row on equal pay.

If gender equality was really part of the fabric of society, fairness would be enshrined in the workplace and beyond. No boy would feel entitled to prey on a girl, while the locker room banter that we are told is just a harmless expression of team bonding, would be seen for what it is: vicious and degrading.

If boys and girls learned about equality at home and had it reinforced at school or in their sports clubs, there would be no need for all this breast beating about consent .

In his public apology, Paddy Jackson says that he has betrayed his family’s values, ‘the most important of which is respect’. That dreadful night that caused such suffering, and so many other nights involving other young people that are never reported, would never have happened if young men looked on young women as equals and friends, rather than sex objects to be ‘taken’.

Consent may act as a safety valve against rape and violation, but equality will achieve more – and in all areas of human relations.