Sex ed in the real world
As a sexuality education teacher, I imagine a time when every single American student will get comprehensive and accurate sexual health education. It won't matter if they are students in New York City or Birmingham, Alabama. Every American will see that the real meaning of "moral values" is protecting our youth. We will all want to equip them with the knowledge and tools to prevent teen pregnancy and sexually transmitted infections. We will do this because we love and care about our youth.
But I'm a realist. I have a sneaking suspicion that even in this perfect world of mine, there may still be issues. Even with the comprehensive sexual education we are so desperately fighting to implement, there may still be problems. I know this because of my real-life experiences with this issue and youth.
I can tell you right now what the two issues will still be.
1. Our youth are becoming sexually active younger and younger.
I've worked with sixth graders who are already sexually active. They began with oral sex in fourth grade and are now having vaginal intercourse. They're not having safe sex because most of them don't know what the phrase "safe sex" means. In many areas of our country, that lesson, if they have it at all, doesn't come until high school. So when should we start teaching how to put on a condom? At the point we're at now, we should be doing it in elementary school.
It's bad enough we have high school girls performing oral sex on guys without protection or caution, but now we have it more and more in middle school and even elementary school. That's not okay with me. I consider myself a sex-positive person and I truly do not care whether someone is sexually active or not. But I do care when it involves children and young people who are not equipped with the knowledge to protect themselves.
I hate the idea that middle school students are having sex. But what I hate even more is that we aren't helping them be safe about it because we think they're too young.
If our fourth graders are participating in oral sex, we have no choice but to teach them how to be safe. But we also need to figure out what is driving this trend and how to stop it. Our children deserve better. We need to fix this issue before we're forced to teach every eight-year old how to put on a condom.
2. Even with the best sexual education, they still may not listen.
We always have to remember that we're working with young people here: invincible and care free young people. You can tell them to wear a seatbelt. You can tell them to not drink and drive. You can tell them to wear condoms. But sometimes, they just do not listen.
And we can't judge them because we've all been there. We all have been in that state of mind where nothing bad can happen and that the tragic stories on the news happen to "other people," not us.
I ask the high school sophomores I have taught why students their age aren't wearing condoms. No matter how many times I pose this question or how many different people I ask, I get the same answers every single time.
1. Condoms don't feel as good.
2. We're embarrassed to buy them.
3. They're inconvenient and ruin the moment.
4. They're drunk at the time and decide not to wear one.
We go through all of the reasons together as a group and I try to show them what the solutions are to these "reasons/excuses." They know they need to use condoms but some of them will still refuse. They tell me they'll take their chances. And when I even bring up using flavored condoms for oral sex on a male, the laughter and rolling eyes begin.
So what do we do? We already know that abstinence-only education is completely useless. We also know that comprehensive and accurate sexual education does work for many of our youth. Unfortunately, we can't even begin to fully measure the success or failures of it because not every American student is getting that education.
How can we move forward and figure out what else we need to add to sexual education if we still have people fighting to go backwards? Abstinence-only education sets our youth back and it sets back our efforts to help them.
None of us ever said comprehensive sexual education is perfect. There will be kinks to work out and gaps to fill. But we can't even begin to think about that because we're still fighting to implement it in all our states and schools. We're too busy trying to help the children and youth our country has already failed.
Lauren Bull
9 January 2008
http://www.rhrealitycheck.org/blog/2008/01/09/sex-ed-in-the-real-world