How was it for you? It was pretty crap for me tbh. I’m talking about the sex education we received at school.
I’ve been reminded by my experiences by the news that young women in Australia have been given electronic dolls, designed to simulate the real experience of having a baby and discourage teenage pregnancy. The ‘Baby Think It Over Dolls’ formed part of a Virtual Infant Parenting programme run in 57 schools in the country.
It seems that the dolls didn’t quite work as intended. The study found that 175 of girls who had used the dolls had become pregnant by the age of 20, while amongst those who had never used them the figure was 11%.
Similar schemes operate in the US, based on the misguided notion that carrying around a plastic faux baby is somehow so horrific that it will stop women from having sex. And yet, as this study proves, there is no robust evidence whatsoever that they work.
I’m 28 and I went to a comprehensive school in England. I remember being shown a video of a woman giving birth, I can’t remember exactly when. That might actually have happened in primary school. At secondary school there was an awful lot about how not to get pregnant, absolutely nothing about consent and, to my knowledge, the word clitoris was not mentioned a single time. Sex education wasn’t so much sex education as a Don’t Get Pregnant diktat.
The moment that is most clearly etched into my memory is a grey afternoon when I was in Year 9 or 10. I think it was raining, perhaps that’s me trying to inject some pathetic fallacy here. Let’s say it was raining. I was sitting in a Design and Technology class room with 30 or 40 other girls in my year and we were listening to a young woman, who can’t have been older than 18 speak. I stared at the vice which was attached to my bench as she spoke, fidgeting on my wobbly wooden stool. I can’t remember what she looked like, I think she was wearing a cardigan, but what she said has never left me.
‘I love her so much and I wouldn’t change her for the world…’ there was a pause which I knew would be followed by a ‘but’ and it was. The young woman sitting before us had just had a baby. She told us, in n certain terms, about how difficult it was.
At the time I don’t remember being particularly taken aback by her. I don’t remember questioning why she was put before us. All I remember is feeling awkward and keen to get out of the crowded room as quickly as possible.
Looking back, I feel angry. How did she come to be sitting before us in the name of sex education? How must she have felt to be talking about her decision to proceed with a pregnancy in front of a room of strange teenagers? There was an element of shame and an atmosphere of teacher knows best about it all. Equally, submitting a young woman to such an ordeal with the presumable aim of preventing the rest of us from getting pregnant was pointless. Did it stop us from having sex? No. Were most of us already on the pill/fully stocked with condoms by that point? Yes.
Sex and relationships education (SRE) in the Western world still leaves a lot to be desired. In this country a new campaign, It’s My Right, has been launched in an attempt to drum up support for statutory SRE. Isn’t it time that they made SRE a statutory subject? As the campaign points out– ‘statutory status would allow SRE to be treated the same as other subjects – with teachers getting the training they need and enough time being allocated in the time-table for this vital subject to address real life issues including respectful relationship, domestic violence and consent.’
There’s more to sex than not getting pregnant, failing to address that directly impacts young people’s lives. Equally, there must be more to sex education than a drive to lower teen pregnancy figures, that's only part of the story. Young people need and deserve more than that.
After all, we may have our differences but sex is one of the few things we all have in common. It’s a basic human function. Warning young people not to do it has been failing for generations, we need to do better.
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Follow Vicky on Twitter @Victoria_Spratt
This article originally appeared on The Debrief.