Last week, The P&J published an article headlined: “Filthy’ language in sex education resources has no place in Highland primary classrooms, say parents”. It’s fair to say that it didn’t go down well, and quite rightly so.
The story highlighted that some parents and a retired Highland couple don’t like modern sex education. In other news, the sky is blue.
Columnist Scott Begbie has already pointed out that this is ultimately about seeing sexuality as “a source of guilt and shame”, and it remains the case that if you are terrified of “adult words” for body parts then you should speak to a therapist rather than a journalist. We certainly shouldn’t be listening to you when making decisions about sexual education for young people.
It would be easy to dismiss the whole episode as prudish nonsense and misguided journalism. But there’s more to it than that.
This wasn’t just some ill-advised reporting, or a story totally detached from current discourse. It did not come out of nowhere.
Instead, this was another strand in the push to undo the progress of recent years and reassert the awful, grinding social conservatism that we desperately need to leave in the past where it belongs.
This campaign manifests in many different ways – claims that LGBT-inclusive education is harmful to young people, zealots harassing teachers outside of schools over “gender ideology”, the attempt to assert “parents” rights’ as being more important than those of children, suggestions that a simple survey to inform sexual education and healthcare is some sort of government-funded grooming operation – but the goal is the same: regression.
And the inevitable outcome, if such moves succeed, is more young people at risk of harm.
Some adults want children to be kept in the dark
The best way to protect young people is to be open and honest with them. Not only does this give them the information they need to understand their own development, and encourage them to talk to adults when they need help, but it is also a key component in allowing them to appreciate critical matters of consent.
For some reason, though, increasingly vocal forces in our society want the opposite. They want young people kept in the dark, lied to, and made to feel the same shame and guilt and self-hatred that, very obviously, did a great deal of harm to previous generations.
Of course, they’ll dress it up as protecting children – the people who wanted to keep Section 28 did the same
Our kids deserve so much better than to be held hostage to bigotry and outdated sensibilities. If some people struggle to cope with the idea that the world changes, or are threatened by the notion of people feeling free to genuinely be themselves, then that’s their problem. They have no right to project their own flaws, insecurities and – whether they’ll admit it or not – hatred onto young people
Of course, they’ll dress it up as protecting children – the people who wanted to keep Section 28 did the same. Some of them might even have convinced themselves to believe it.
But the rest of us aren’t required to play along, and should stand against it for the sake of our kids.
James McEnaney is a former secondary school teacher, journalist, and author of Class Rules: the Truth about Scottish Schools
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