Why good sex education is vital for society
Let’s start at the end. Low sexual harassment rates, sexual satisfaction for all and open communication about personal desires and needs. Now, in an ideal world these goals would be achieved through effective and comprehensive sex education in schools. So, let’s explore sex ed as it stands and see what we can do to work towards this utopia.
Sex education is a vital yet often neglected part of the education system. In many cases sex ed focusses on the risks and dangers of sex and teaching is founded in scaremongering. The sex ed I got at school was comprised of gross pictures of sexually transmitted infections and penis + vagina = baby. At no point in my formal education was the idea ever introduced that sex is supposed to be enjoyable for women. I always assumed that the only reason women had sex was to please a man or to make a baby.
The current curriculum states that sex education should not encourage sexual experimentation and I think that sentiment has been taken too far. Informing students about the importance of both/all partners enjoying sex is one that is fundamental in discussions of consent and safety. If someone is not taught that sex is for pleasure, then how can they identify abusive, inappropriate or unhealthy relationships if they don’t know that they should be enjoying themselves as well.
The online sex toy shop @selfandmore worked with their followers to create the perfect analogy for this: “teaching sex education without mentioning pleasure is like teaching someone to drive without telling them they need to turn the engine on.” @selfandmore use their Instagram page to give masturbating tips for how to get the most out of your sex toys.
Now, I’m by no means all knowledgeable on all things sex and relationships but looking back, everything in the classroom felt so far removed from the realities and complexities of sexual relationships. There were so many assumptions about what students knew and it felt like once you had sex for the first time, you were supposed to all of a sudden know everything about sex. Of course, we all know that’s not how it works but with a severe lack of any useful sex education lessons I found myself unsure of where to look for answers.
The 2004 American film The Girl Next Door perfectly sums up how I felt and shows how outdated sex ed resources can be. The film follows high school students watching an old 80s sex ed video. One student has the idea to remake the video but modernise it so it’s more relevant to students his age, luckily his next-door neighbour is a porn star. The new sex ed video is hosted by two porn stars who talk about sex and show you how to put a condom on a real penis (that’s left up to the imagination in the movie). While the film is a comedic comment on poor sex ed teaching, it highlights how important it is to have up to date resources to make the content relevant for young people. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not suggesting students make their own sex ed videos, but creative thinking about how to teach sex ed will lead to more engaging and relatable lessons for students.
I spoke to a secondary school teacher about how her year 11 class feel about sex ed. The teacher wished to remain anonymous so for the purpose of this article I will refer to her as Hannah. Her students raised concerns that sex ed is sometimes taught by older teachers who can have old fashioned views on sex and relationships compared to younger teachers that are more progressive.
These views centre around marriage, children and finding “the one” before losing your virginity. Hannah described the impact this has on her students, “when they are taught by older teachers they don’t feel as comfortable asking questions because they don’t think they’ll get a true response from the teacher so you’re restricting the conversation.” Younger teachers were seen as more relatable, and the students felt that their questions would be answered more honestly and realistically.
Hannah told me that as a teacher she feels very protective of her students and she can see how teachers would put their “parent hat” on to teach sex ed. While teachers might feel like they are protecting their students it’s important to be as open as possible so students feel comfortable asking questions. Feeling unsure of how to teach sex ed in the most appropriate way could come down to the fact that, as one primary school teacher told me, “we as teachers don’t get taught how to teach sex ed so we are lacking in confidence to teach it.”
Primary school teacher Andy Baker and I discussed the need for a good relationship between teachers and students for effective sex ed classes. “I think talking about such sensitive issues with children if you’ve not got that relationship might mean that they don’t ask the questions that they want to ask.” Andy also uses an anonymous question box to encourage children to ask any other questions that they have.
Andy told me that sex ed was the one topic that teachers at his school could not hand over to someone else to teach. The school saw the teacher pupil relationships with class teachers as essential to the teaching of sex ed. This was so the children trusted their teacher and would hopefully feel they were in a safe, non-judgemental environment to ask any questions that they might have.
In primary schools, sex education is not on the curriculum and all schools that teach sex ed have to give parents the right to remove their children from these classes. Exclusion from key sex ed classes can create a bigger mystery around sex, and could lead to children looking elsewhere for answers. It’s now easier than ever to access the internet and children could potentially expose themselves to images or videos that are inappropriate for their age group.
Regardless of how good sex ed is, kids will still be looking at porn. It may be an uncomfortable subject to discuss in class but at a secondary school level, children should be taught that porn creates an unrealistic representation of sexual relationships. Porn is made for entertainment in the same way that Jurassic Park was made to be entertaining. We all know the dinosaurs aren’t real, nevertheless they appear on our TVs through the magic of special effects in the same way that good editing and fake bodily fluids can make sex look crazy on screen. But if you’ve never had sex before how are you supposed to know the difference between porn and reality unless someone tells you?
While some parents choose to take their children out of sex ed, the government are making that decision for other children by not making sex ed compulsory in all schools. Sex education at a secondary school level is only compulsory in local authority maintained secondary schools of which, as of 2017, there were only 1083 in England out of 6446 secondary schools. This means some children might go through their entire formal education without having a single sex education lesson. Andy thinks that “until it’s written in more detail into the curriculum so that it becomes necessary knowledge, some children will miss out on sex ed because some schools don’t cover it or because parents choose to pull their kids out of it.”
The pandemic has only made this worse. At Hannah’s school, a private secondary school, they teach sex ed in year 10 only. For this year’s class they’ve had no sex education lessons and will complete their time at secondary school with no sex ed classes. The academic side of the curriculum is put first in this instance and the pressure of catching up on lost face to face class time means grades and achievements are put before life skills.
The school Hannah teaches at has a strong Christian ethos which she believes interferes with sex ed teaching. Recently, Hannah asked if she could do an assembly to celebrate LGBTQ+ month as she knew that this would be a good way to encourage students to be themselves and to respect others. The assembly wasn’t authorised as senior staff and governors said that talking about LGBTQ+ month didn’t promote a Christian ethos. As a Christian herself Hannah said that her understanding of Christian ethos is based in love and respect for one another and to not discuss LGBTQ+ relationships in school is to “ignore a whole community of people, some of whom exist within the school.”
Religion can be a roadblock for sex ed teaching, especially when private schools are not required to follow the national curriculum and teach sex ed. Religious studies is a compulsory lesson in all schools that parents can’t remove their children from. Studying religion promotes understanding and acceptance of other religions by becoming informed about other beliefs and practices. The same logic then should apply to sex ed, failing to educate about the LGBTQ+ community fails to include students within the school and wider community, placing more importance on understanding and respecting other people’s religions rather than their sexualities.
For Drag King Nathalie Gannon, 27, the omission of sexuality and gender identity teaching in school led to a long journey of discovering and accepting her sexuality. Nathalie was taught sex ed at secondary school from a video called the ‘A to Z of sex’. She distinctly remembers that when it came to O for orgasm the teacher skipped past it and told them it wasn’t something they needed to know about, “which in hindsight doesn’t take in to account the female experience and completely left out the fact that it can be a very very pleasurable activity.” For Nathalie, ignoring female pleasure “teaches girls that [sex] is a service, an act to do to please someone and you learn that it’s something that your worth and validation is very much weighted on.”
Nathalie told me that a lack of teaching about female pleasure and healthy relationships contributed to her not coming to terms with her sexuality until she was in her mid 20s. She noted that the media and sex ed promote the idea that men and women are completely different and can’t understand each other. “Those sort of thoughts reinforced, made me not question that I was straight, I was like well of course I’m meant to kind of hate my partner, of course we’re not meant to get along, of course I have to put out and offer myself up in order to keep the relationship together, of course it’s based on sex, all of these different things made it a lot harder to understand and come to terms with my actual sexuality.”
Teaching sex ed has an extra layer of complexity when you take into account the home environments that children might be growing up in. They could be living with divorced parents, same sex parents, in foster homes or countless other situations. This makes it vital that sex ed explores what it means to have a healthy relationship as some children might not have good examples of relationships at home. In order to equip young people with the skills they need to develop healthy relationships, sex ed needs to be standardised and compulsory in all schools so children are able to identify and remove themselves from unhealthy relationships.
Unfortunately, abusive and inappropriate behaviour can take place in schools with peer-to-peer abuse and teachers abusing their positions of trust and power. This has culminated in the creation of Everyone’s Invited, a website set up for survivors to anonymously report their experiences of rape culture in schools and universities. Everyone’s Invited define rape culture as “when attitudes, behaviours and beliefs in society have the effect of normalising and trivialising sexual violence.” Since Everyone’s Invited started, some schools have received pressure to review their processes for reporting and dealing with sexual misconduct. If students are experiencing rape culture at school, then it’s unlikely they’ll feel comfortable reporting sexual misconduct if it’s normalised within their institution.
A UN report that researched the prevalence of sexual harassment in the UK was published in March this year. It detailed how 86% of women aged 18-24 had experienced some form of sexual harassment. The tragic death of Sarah Everard coincided with this damning report. Her disappearance was spread far and wide on social media and there was hope that she would be found safe. After confirmation that her body had been found, women across the country were outraged about her death and furious that women were not able to walk home safely.
Sarah Everard’s murder hit home with many women who felt unsafe while alone in public places for fear of being catcalled, followed or kidnapped. The sexual harassment report stated that 71% of women of all ages said that they had been subject to some form of sexual harassment in public places. In order to combat sexual harassment, the public need to be educated. For those in the school system now, these conversations can start in sex ed classes, so children clearly know what sexual harassment is and what to do if you see or hear about sexual harassment.
As you can tell, all of these conversations that come under the umbrella of sex ed won’t fit in to one week of teaching a year. To effectively teach sex ed, lessons need to be spread out throughout the school year. With regular classes the students will quickly run out of dick jokes and there will be time to discuss topics in detail rather than rushing through content. Andy pointed out that waiting till the end of the year to teach sex ed in primary school means some children go through different stages of puberty throughout the school year and if they haven’t had a class about periods for example, they might start bleeding and not know what’s happening to them.
A 2019 bid to make sex ed compulsory in all schools acknowledged the need for training teachers to teach sex ed classes. Some content covered in sex ed is often out of the reach of an individual teacher’s own experiences so training teachers to know how to answer these questions or find out answers will rapidly expand on the conversations that they’re able to facilitate.
In order to cover the basics of sex ed and save time, some teachers split their classes up into male and female groups. Andy feels that this is detrimental to sex education. “I think it’s important that both sides know what both sides go through.” Separating classes creates a divide in knowledge within schools and while each sex might understand what they go through they might be completely unfamiliar with the opposite sex.
At a secondary school this chasm can widen, as Andy recalls, when he was at school, his class was split up into girls and boys. The girls learnt about contraception and put condoms on fruit and veg while the boys didn’t even get shown condoms in class, “but that’s a massively important thing for a man to know about, obviously women need to know about it as well, but that to me emphasised that the woman should be responsible for contraception not the man, which to me doesn’t make any sense to me.”
While the responsibility of contraception can be focussed on women, the education and health system fail to properly inform women of the risks of contraception as well as how to access the contraception you want. From countless conversations with women over the years, it’s clear that the pill is first thing a GP will offer you. I visited my GP and specifically asked for the copper coil (IUD), a non-hormonal long-term form of contraception and I was sent home with the pill. Even after asking for a particular type of contraception and stating that I wanted a non-hormonal option I was prescribed the pill. Thankfully I googled my local sexual health clinic and was fitted with a coil, no one tried to offer me the pill and the pros and cons of the copper coil were fully discussed with me before it was fitted. These two experiences were worlds apart and had I not done my own research and sought additional medical advice then I would’ve thought the pill was my only option.
There can be some outdated views around contraception that stop women from getting the right contraception for them. I was told that the coil was only recommended to women who’d had children and as a result I know very few young women who know that they could have a coil fitted if they wanted. Young adults are leaving the education system not knowing where to get contraception and feeling that their options are limited if their GP will only offer them the pill. @get.the.lowdown was set up to combat this lack of knowledge and resources for learning about contraception. Their website invites people who use contraception to review their experiences to help other people come to a more informed decision about what contraception would be best for them.
This is the upside to the internet, people that are not afraid to talk about sex and who want to educate others. If contraception fails or you choose to have a child, the state of sex education means that some people can become parents and know very little about their own bodies. After seeing Zoella hit front page news, Emily Clarkson, writer and influencer, used her Instagram to talk to her 178k followers about female pleasure. One of her follower’s experiences has played on my mind ever since. The message said that she was a 29-year-old single mum of three who recently learnt about her clitoris by following the Instagram account @lalalaletmeexplain which is run by a sex and dating columnist for OK Magazine.
If some people can reach adulthood and not know about their own anatomy, then it doesn’t look good for their children unless there is sufficient education in schools. Lack of knowledge not only affect a pleasurable sex life, it can also have dangerous health consequences. The Eve Appeal (@eveappeal) work to raise awareness of the five gynaecological cancers. Explaining the symptoms to look out for is a great way to make people more conscious of their bodies, however, if there is no basis for someone to understand what their body should do normally, how can they begin to look out for signs that something is not as it should be?
In an ideal world the sex education system would undergo tremendous reform and students would regularly attend classes that cover a standardised curriculum. In theory no child should leave education without the knowledge and tools needed to conduct happy, healthy and pleasurable sex lives and relationships. The impact assessment for the 2019 proposition to make sex ed compulsory in all schools showed the huge financial impact that changing the curriculum will have. The policy change was not approved so it’s unlikely sex ed classes in school will drastically change anytime soon.
So, what can we do in the meantime? As adults, we can work to educate ourselves by following Instagram accounts like the ones mentioned in this article. Listen to sex and relationships podcasts like F**ks Given hosted by @comecurious, a sex, body and mental health honesty platform. As parents, we can educate ourselves so that we can better educate our children and be open to having conversations with them that may be awkward to begin with. As teachers, we can try our best to be honest with students and answer any questions that they might have, even if we need to do some research first to find out the answers. And as friends, we can talk openly about sex and relationships and learn from each other.
Feature image by Markus Winkler on Unsplash