Sex education should start at age 6
At my house, boys have "willies" and girls have "millies". At a friend's house, girls' parts are described as "poopsies" (often said in a Betty Boop type voice).
I personally hate the term "front bottom". It sounds like the bum is trying to annex the wild and untamed land of female genitals. But some people do like it and that's fine. After all, when it comes down to it, we all have the same proper names for these parts of the body: penis, vagina, vulva, testicles.
Yet if it's all the same to you, some campaigners would rather young kids weren't taught the real words. The FPA, formerly the Family Planning Association, has published a new booklet for 6-year-olds to encourage earlier discussions about the facts of life. (Read more about what it will include here, such as illustrations of genitals, and what one mother thought of it.) But critics have condemned it as “a very worrying development”. They say that starting sex education younger will lead to more promiscuous behaviour and teen pregnancy.
A raft of studies prove that thinking is wrong, whether you're looking at pregnancy, age of first incident of intercourse or rate of HIV infection. (One such study is "Abstinence only vs comprehensive sex education: what are the arguments? What is the evidence" from the AIDS Research Institute, University of California, San Francisco; here's another that includes results from a study reported in the British Medical Journal in 2007.)
So why do some groups keep condemning efforts to improve and normalise sex education? Why don't they applaud the move to bring education into a safe classroom environment conveyed by teachers or parents rather than leaving it to nuggets whispered by the know-it-all kid in the playground?
It seems obvious to me. What so-called family campaigners' want to teach children about their bodies and sex is shame. Shame explains the thinking that there's something inappropriate and "wrong" for a child to know the correct word to describe a part of their body. That knowing the correct words indoctrinates an attitude of free and easy sexuality. That it sullies their pure souls to know how babies are made and to explain what they can see the cow and the bull doing in the field.
A few years ago I wrote a piece for Seventeen magazine called Vagina 101 that answered the real questions young girls had about their bodies: what should I look like? Should I shave my hair? What's a clitoris and where is it?
It was refreshing to interview highly respected doctors who robustly argued that girls and parents should get over their phobias. "The vagina is no different from an ear or a nostril. It's just a place that's part of us," one said.
The piece won an award, but one chain of grocery stores pulled it from the shelves. Some parents had complained about the "graphic" nature of the medical illustrations and descriptions. They likened it to pornography. One mother of a 17-year-old told a local reporter, "It's dirty. It's dirty."
Responding to the just-released FPA booklet, Trevor Stammers, a GP and trustee of the Family Education Trust, told the Times, “The doctrine of ‘if it feels right for you, do it’ has been disastrous, simply leading to younger and younger teenagers having sex…”. That's not true. But in contrast, these groups have a different message. Sex education is only right if it feels wrong.
Related:
Dr Jane Collins tells how to explain the facts of life
