We need fresh thinking on teaching of sex education
All sensible people are in favour of sex education, aren't they? You can't have children growing up in this modern world thinking that babies are found in cabbage patches or that AIDS is some kind of bad-luck "plague" visited upon victims without rhyme or reason.
The facts must be delivered so that young people can be prepared for life as it is, and can make their own responsible choices.
That's the theory, and it is also the project the British government has held dear for the last dozen years -- almost since New Labour came to power in 1997. In 1998, Tony Blair promised to "cut by half" the number of young teenage pregnancies in Britain, but he didn't have much success.
And in its dying days, Prime Minister Gordon Brown's administration has embarked on yet another sex education law, which will make the subject compulsory in schools.
A coda to the bill permits faith schools -- Catholic, Anglican Jewish and Muslim -- to teach sex education (euphe-mistically called personal, social and health education) within the context of their own ethos, but this is the type of compromise which seems to satisfy no one. Ed Balls, the children's minister, has been accused by sex education progressives of buckling under pressure from "the religious right".
Meanwhile, the faith schools' lobby consider it dictatorial and contrary to conscience that they will be forced to give pupils information on, for example, where to obtain an abortion.
The strange thing about sex education projects is that when subjected to evidence-based tests -- testing whether something works effectively -- it seems so often not to work effectively.
For the last 12 years, the more sex education there has been, the more sexual activity there has also been among the group targeted -- under-age school pupils vulnerable to unwanted pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases. Between 2006 and 2009, conception figures among girls from 12 to 15 years old rose from 7.8pc to 8.1pc.
More than £280m (€313m) has been spent on teenage contraception and sex education since 1998, barely making a dent in the statistics of single teenage pregnancy. Even government ministers admit they're "disappointed" with the results.
Professor Brenda Almond of Hull University states: "There is precious little evidence that sex education reduces the number of teenage pregnancies. Just the opposite could be the case.
"Authoritative research has found that the more sex education children receive in schools, the greater their involvement in early sexual activity."
Could the problem lie in the way that sex education is taught? The emphasis in contemporary sex education textbooks is on "choice", on the young person being "empowered" to make her own decisions, and on the necessity of using a condom on all occasions.
There is even a bus advert that goes around London carrying the slogan: "Always use a condom." What? Even if you're aged 30, married and trying for a baby? Surely this is a didactic, over-simplified slogan that goes against common sense, and is therefore implausible.
And is the political language, and ideology, of modern sex education also too removed from common sense and everyday experience? In some ways, it seems to be an inverse version of the sermonising of yore about chastity, which was so high-minded and unreal it eventually came to be seen as dishonest.
Modern sex education seems also to dwell in a realm of theories removed from the hurly-burly of real life, emphasising, as it does, "equality", "diversity", "rational decisions" and "empowerment".
Surely, if you were to be truly honest about sex, you would teach young people that sex is utterly unequal: nature does not distribute sex appeal on a basis of equality, and the real agony of adolescence is that it contains so much utterly unfair competition and rejection by the beautiful of the plain.
Wouldn't it be more honest to explain that sexual attraction often has nothing whatsoever to do with rational decisions, and everything to do with a mad fancy for, perhaps, someone entirely unsuitable?
Or that when the reckless moment arrives, the prudent application of contraception is the last thing on your mind (and moreover, nature's relentless drive for fertility is subconsciously trying to make you throw all caution to the wind?) Isn't that more factual than airy-fairy ideas about "empowerment", "respect" and "choice"?
The official theories are, in any case, very much in conflict with the highly sexualised globalised culture where porn material is available at the click of a mouse. A recent British government survey (carried out by YouGov) found that 27pc of young boys look at pornography online each week, and this diminishes their "respect" for females.
Meanwhile, little girls are encouraged to dress like tarts from the age of eight and to go on networking sites such as Miss Bimbo, which obsesses about cosmetic surgery, dieting and hyper-sexualisation.
Wouldn't it also be more honest to admit that youngsters are under immense pressure to become sexually active before they can really understand the meaning of such relationships, let alone the consequences, and protect them by stopping them from being sexually involved too young?
Is a 10-year-old child (nearly a dozen 10-year-old girls, in the most recent British statistics, have become pregnant) really in a position to make a rational "choice"? Is making the "morning-after pill" more easily available to young girls really the best educational health lesson?
The new compulsory sex education bill still has to go through the House of Lords before it becomes law, and an election may well intervene. But the question must still be tackled.
There is a consensus of the wise that sex education should certainly exist: but some sex education is making the problem worse, not better. Fresh thinking needed, clearly.
- Mary Kenny
Irish Independent
