David Cameron refusing to make Sexual Education compulsory in schools is the epitome of Conservative values that are the enemy of progression. It's right-wing fear mongering at its best. It's as if primary school teachers straight out of uni are going to sit their year 3 class down on the story time carpet and tell tales of how they found a moment of ecstasy with a now nameless person in the club toilets of a 'Freshers School Disco Rave.' Or parents signing off on a school trip, parting with their hard earned cash so the kids can take a trip to a local brothel to get tips on how to use their mouth in ways they'd never dreamed of.
In all situations in life, to be educated is a positive. By denying kids the right to Sex Ed, David Cameron is failing a generation and putting them at genuine risk. In Finland, when the Government made sex education optional, teenage abortion rose, which we all know can have a huge physical and psychological impact on a young woman. When they re-introduced compulsion, the rates dropped back down. In Holland, sex education is compulsory and they have one of the lowest teenage pregnancy rates in the world. Under the UK guidelines, sex education should feature teaching on the importance of marriage and stable relationships but this is evidence of how out of touch the government is. Especially for young people, sex and marriage are completely different entities, just like sex and conception. Nearly every living human being can vouch for the fact that they are interested in sex. This curiosity will always be met and by denying kids of sex education you force their hand, instead of receiving good, solid education from a trained professional, their teacher now becomes PornHub or Redtube. A lack of sex education is the reason why when I worked as a substitute teacher in a secondary school I had a Year 9 boy shout at me across the classroom 'Miss, Isn't it true you can get pregnant from giving someone a blow job,' which resulted in a serious debate within the class. I heard young people talking about sex constantly in the classrooms, the average person loses their virginity at 16, but that doesn't mean they aren't experimenting before then. You can't treat sex like that weird mole you have and hope that by ignoring it it will go away (seriously, get that thing checked). Just because you refuse to acknowledge it in the curriculum, doesn't mean it's not happening outside the classroom (and probably sometimes inside).
More important in all of this, is that from a young age we shouldn't just be teaching sex education, we should be teaching sexuality education. Encouraging a safe and open environment where kids can learn about their own self-image, gender roles, how to express themselves and how they feel about themselves. Growing up in a repressive education system, which means a repressive society (because the link is that tangible between both) doesn't stop people being a certain way, it just makes them feel horrible about it. I can guarantee you this, a child learning about all things LGBT+ at a young age will not be 'turned gay.' But maybe if we were all educated about the subject, that wouldn't be seen as such a bad thing anyway. If children are taught a tunnel vision view of straight, cisgender sex education then everyone outside of that will feel like the 'other'. We are in a society where 30% of young people that identify as gay by the time they are 15 attempt suicide. The pressure from within and from the outside that what they feel is abnormal has a huge strain on a young person.
Education always works, The Dutch again with their liberal stance on education, teach Drug awareness in schools and have very low HIV rates among drug users and some of the lowest rates of problem drug use in Europe. Repression should never be allowed to be a political move. Or maybe I'm just being dramatic, maybe I should understand my Prime Minister is well equipped to make this decision and I should trust him completely. Oh, what was that, he put his penis in a pigs mouth? Maybe giving children the tools to learn and develop as healthy sexual beings isn't such a bad thing.
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