"School Bullshit. " We Need To Do Better Teaching Our Kids About Porn, Consent and Sex.
Here’s your latest heavy fact for the day, teenagers are sexually assaulting each other. In schools. I know, it came as a shock to me too.
I speak regularly about family and sexual violence prevention, so while this is something that I was already vaguely aware of from the literature, it came home to me when speaking at a highschool recently. The teacher quietly told me that he’d had to deal with the police twice in that month over two different sexual assaults on school grounds. Before writing this, I touched based with Executive Director of Auckland’s Rape Prevention Education (RPE) Debbi Tohill to see if this was out of the ordinary. Sadly, she reported that sexual assault on school grounds was an issue that the educators at RPE encounter too.
As a society, we are responsible for this. We’ve created a hyper-sexualized world; one where children are flooded with powerful messages and media about sex and sexuality well before they’ve ever had anyone talk to them about what’s healthy and what isn’t. Conversations about consent, what it is and how to establish it are still too few and far between. The emotional component of sex and relationships often seems to be completely removed from the conversation in the time of hook up apps and high-speed porn.
The NZ Curriculum states that it is compulsory for schools to deliver relationship and sexuality education from Years 1-10. While the current curriculum actually offers a lot of scope for schools to develop awesome relationship and sexuality education programmes that meet the needs and interests of their students, often they do not understand the complexities of this learning area or perhaps don’t value it as much as other parts of the curriculum. This means that some schools invite external service providers to deliver a series of lessons or speakers to talk on a specific topic, while other schools just cover safer sex part of relationships. Schools’ lack of awareness or responsibility for delivering this part of the curriculum comprehensively means that young people aren’t able to have ongoing and meaningful discussions about all of the nuances of sex, sexuality and relationships in the modern world. Reading the Sexuality Education Guidelines is a great way to help people understand the importance of relationship and sexuality education, as well as getting a handle on what content is age and stage appropriate for students.
The kids know what they need to know.
On top of this, there’s not a lot that’s easily accessible that kids can look up that offers good advice on what good healthy sex actually is and in the absence of any uniform, age appropriate, straightforward education about sex and how to have it happily and healthily, it’s the internet that fills the gap. While there’s some good stuff on platforms such as Youtube, there’s a lot more that is troubling, especially when it’s high speed porn that often is kids first port of call, given it’s ubiquity. There’s an estimated 500 000 porn sites on the internet at present, not to mention all the porn on social media sites like Twitter, or circulating in group chats.
So whether they are looking for it or not, kids are going to be exposed to porn. Before they’ve even held hands with someone they’re attracted to, or had their first kiss, young people are often being exposed to adult material. And what makes up the bulk of mainstream, hetrosexual pornography often role models unhealthy behaviors.
Research conducted last year by The Office for the Classification of Film and Literature informs us that 1 in 4 New Zealand youth that were surveyed say they had first saw porn before they were 12. The same body of research told us that 69% of the teens surveyed had seen violence or aggression in pornography, and 72% had seen non-consensual activity.
Is it any wonder then when a school guidance counsellor informed me they had worked with teenage girls, 14 year olds, who were “ripped in half” attempting to have anal sex? Without clear education that porn performers are often actors, kids are recreating the media they’ve taken their education from. There’s rarely simple how to’s demonstrated in porn. There’s no lube, there’s no conversation about consent, or mutual pleasure.
The vast majority of sex in porn focuses exclusively on female performers doing what they are told to pleasure male actors. “Tell me to stop if it hurts or you don’t like this” is something you never hear on PornHub videos. And at the same time, porn routinely shows women like being hurt, as female performers respond either positively to the verbal and physical aggression they are subject to, or are indifferent.
While it’s impossible to identify a single cause for why people do the the things to do, it’s not overly complicated to understand that a lack of education coupled with a steady diet of misogynistic messaging and a glorification of sexual aggression has seen teen sexual offending on the rise not just here in New Zealand but across the ditch. Indeed in many countries with similar cultures such as the United States and Canada,
Kids naturally want to learn about sex and they have brilliant ideas around what they need to know as they grow into adulthood. Speaking at a school recently, after sharing their experiences in some workshops, I asked them for their solutions to the problems they had identified. What they came up with was really brilliant. They wanted explicit education about pornography. They wanted male role models showcasing healthy behavior. They wanted to end the ‘rugby group chat’ and peer pressure that had intimate images being shared non-consensually.
Some of the problems teenagers say they are facing and some of their own solutions.
It’s on us as educators, advocates, parents and politicians to help make these things a uniform feature of all kids’ educations.
So, while society is creating these problems, the hope lies in the fact that society can solve the issues too. If we enact uniform education about sex and sexuality it’s going to have such positive impacts; It’s going to reduce sexual offending.
If we can develop cross party support for policy initiatives that require mandatory age verification for pornpographic websites, that’s going to help limit early access to it. This was put in the too hard basket by the United Kingdom but is being being looked at in Victoria, Australia. Minister for Children Tracey Martin is proposing it here, and while it’s not a silver bullet, it’s a good starting point for protecting young and developing brains from harmful content. The censors office agrees, with Chief Censor David Shanks echoing the need for digital restrictions to be put in place to protect kids.
Let’s educate kids in an age appropriate way about porn. Not just a one-off talk, but with an ongoing conversation. Let’s teach our youth about sex, and pleasure. How to have good sex is just as important a conversation as how not not to get an STI or get pregnant. Let’s be brave and talk about intimacy, and love and relationships too. Whether it’s a casual relationship or a long term one, we can’t divorce the emotional aspect that comes with sex either. Let’s teach our youth that mutual respect and kindness needs to be part and parcel of any and every sexual experience.
In their own words kids want better sex education. They are tired of being talked to like they are 3 years old about it or not at all. Curiosity about sex is an important part of normal and natural part of human development, kids want to know about it, but we aren’t teaching them what they want and need to know. In the space that’s left, porn fills the gap, and people are being hurt as a result. Let’s fix that.
Special thanks to Dr Samantha Keene, Scott Waring Flood and Zaffa Christian at the MSD, Debbi Tohill at Rape Prevention Education and Jo Robertson at The Light Project for your input into this piece.
Where to go for more information:
https://thelightproject.co.nz/
https://www.familyplanning.org.nz/
https://www.matesanddates.co.nz/