Sex-ed 2.0: Life, love and lust
From “sinister sexual behaviours” to “lies” and efforts to “manufacture ignorance”, looks at the high-stakes fight to decide what students are taught about their bodies and about sex
Thirteen-year old Nadine is annoyed. “You’ve known me, like, forever,” she says. “You know I don’t have diseases.” “You’re totally hot,” Zubair replies. “But this arguing over the condom — it’s ruining the mood.”
Nadine starts to undress her boyfriend and responds: “I’ll get you back in the mood.”
This is not a scene from a comingof-age romance movie. It’s a script from the department of basic education’s new sex-ed lesson plans for Grade 8 school children. The new curriculum is aimed at moving the country beyond the ABCS — abstain, be faithful, condomise — and towards comprehensive sexual education for schoolchildren from Grade 4 to matric.
This kind of sex-ed teaches children about the emotional, physical and social aspects of sexuality.
Classroom content can feature everything from information about contraception to role playing how to handle scenarios involving bullying, sexting and even — like the scene between Nadine and Zubair — relationship power dynamics.
Ideally, says the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation, comprehensive sex education leaves learners empowered to make decisions about their health and understand how their decisions affect others.
The approach has been scientifically proven to help children make safer sexual choices.
But, in South Africa, the education department’s new plans to teach this way have provoked a backlash among some parents, religious groups and teachers’ unions.
These groups are pushing unfounded claims that giving children information about sex will encourage them to experiment with what the Christian think tank Family Policy Institute calls “sinister sexual behaviours”.
Meanwhile, researchers disagree about whether the plans are progressive at all.
The Life Orientation curriculum in South Africa is disconnected from young people’s lives, argues Catriona Macleod, a professor of psychology at Rhodes University in Makhanda.
In 2015, Macleod and her colleagues asked 24 Eastern Cape college-age students what they thought of the sex education they got in school as part of a study published in the journal Perspectives in Education.
Students mostly scoffed at their teachers’ attempts to teach them the ABCS, which go one step further than abstinence-only education by instructing learners that if they do choose to have sex, they should only have one partner, and that they should use a condom.
But young people said lessons where teachers tried to “preach” to them about how they should behave had little bearing on their conduct outside of class.
One student explained: “We write tests, we study the best ways to abstain. We know it’s in our minds, but we don’t do it outside [of school].”
Nationally, the number of teen moms delivering in hospital fell by 11% between 2012 and 2017, district health data published by the Health Systems Trust reveals. But that still translates to just under 23000 of the almost 1-million babies delivered in 2017 being born to mothers between the ages of 10 and 19, Statistics South Africa recorded.
Almost three out of every four girls who had children before the age of 18 said their pregnancies were unintended, according to a 2012 South African household survey published in the journal African Health Sciences. About half said they didn’t understand how conception worked at the time they fell pregnant.
Today, women between the ages of 15 and 24 make up a third of the country’s new HIV infections, preliminary results from the country’s
HIV household survey shows. Less than half of women in this age group reported using a condom the last time they had sex.
In a 2014 systematic review published in the journal PLOS One, researchers pitted the three models of sex education against each other. That is, abstinence-only, the ABCS and comprehensive sexuality education.
The winner? Comprehensive sexuality education.
This had the largest impact on changing Hiv-related behaviours such as early sexual debut, condom use and the number sexual partners, researchers found.
The most effective sexual education interventions were those that also included activities outside of school, such as training healthcare staff to offer youth-friendly services, distributing condoms and involving parents and communities in the development of the lessons.
South Africa’s national action plan to fight HIV, tuberculosis and sexually transmitted infections includes a goal to roll out comprehensive sexuality education. In the next two years, the government aims to have this type of sexuality education in half of all schools in areas that have a high burden of HIV.
But at the moment, only 5% of schools teach comprehensive sexuality education, the document shows.
Comprehensive sexuality education, Rhodes psychology professor Macleod says, is a far more effective way of reducing unwanted pregnancies and new HIV infections than its competitors.
Macleod explains: “Whatever your moral position is, if you look at the research comprehensive sexuality education is the way to go.”
‘Dear diary, I saw an angel. She looked like heaven on earth; every boy’s dream.” That’s what one 16-year-old boy wrote in his journal as part of a 2003 study. But what he and other young men were confiding to their diaries as part of the research was very different than what they were saying in group discussions with other boys. This is according to the paper — published as a result of this study in the African Journal of Aids Research — which looked at HIV education in six African countries including South Africa, Botswana and Zimbabwe.
In group interviews with peers, young men bragged about sleeping with girls and then dumping them – a phenomenon researchers chalked up to harmful messages children get about what it means to be a man.
If it weren’t for the diary entries, researchers would never have known about the heart-wrenching stories of love and loss that young boys experienced.
The department’s new plans address this with multiple lessons that teach children how to identify unhealthy stereotypes about men and women — and explain what they could do instead. For example, the plans suggest: “You get to decide how you want to be a man.”
But Macleod is not convinced the department’s plans go far enough to move beyond messages of danger and disease around sex. She points to the words printed in bold black letters at the start of the section about harmful gender stereotypes — “The SAFEST choice is abstinence.”
“Same-old, same-old,” she quips. “They’re still pushing abstinence as the main goal.”
In addition, the plans don’t do enough — according to Macleod — to integrate the experiences of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender children.
But Anthony Brown disagrees. He’s a senior life orientation and inclusive education lecturer at the University of Johannesburg’s department of educational psychology.
He believes the plans will open up discussion and understanding about all sexual identities.