Glenden BrownSexuality Education is a Justice Issue
For the next few days, I’ll be busy with an Our Whole Lives facilitator training. It’s unlikely I personally will be posting on OneUtah for a few days but the other amazing writers here will keep you informed and thinking so keep checking in on our online community. When I return I will have a post about the politics of payday lending in Utah.
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Since I’m thinking about sexuality education that’s what I’m talking about today. I believe providing comprehensive sexuality education is an issue of justice. Our Whole Lives is a comprehensive, life span, medically accurate sexuality education program. Created by the United Church of Christ and the Unitarian/Universalist Associaton, Our Whole Lives is built on four core values: self-worth, responsibility, sexual health, and justice and inclusivity.
As a Christian, I believe that we are called to do justice, love mercy and walk humbly with the Divine. Justice means taking action and creating a better society for all persons. I once heard a just society defined as one in which those furthest from wealth and power are neverthess assured that their needs will be met. Having seen the chaos that results from failing to properly education persons about sexuality - whether unplanned pregnancies, sexual assault and abuse, STI’s, and relationships going incredibly badly - I believe a need of all people is comprehensive sexuality education. As an adult, I have a personal responsibility to nurture and mentor young people, to provide them with the information they need to be sexually mature, safe, and healthy. Comprehensive sexuality education covers a wide array of topics, including contraception, safer sex/harm reducation, family planning, communication and refusal skills, medically accurate information about the human body, and medically accurate information about pregnancy, fertility, and STI’s, and information about sexual orientation and gender identity. For the purposes of sexuality education, information is drawn from mainstream medical and mental health organizations; groups such as NARTH are unreliable at best for accurate information.
Comprehensive sexuality education works. Adolescents who complete the courses delay sexual behaviors for up to a 18 months. They are more likely to use contraception consistently and correctly. They have significantly lower rates of STI’s and unplanned pregnancies. Programs like Our Whole Lives work because they meet people where they are in their lives with the information they need, they use proven pedagogical methods, and they focus on behavioral change rather than attempting to teach “values.” The values component of Our Whole Lives emphasizes empowering students to understand and articulate their personal values and views. As an instructor, I don’t lecture, I facilitate discussion, exploration and learning.
Comprehensive sexuality education must provide students with honest, accurate answers to their questions. Accurate information about sexuality is helpful, not harmful, to persons and when it is provided in an age appropriate manner, it empowers participants in sexuality education classes.
As a matter of enacting social justice, comprehensive sexuality education is one way of meeting people’s needs, empowering people to make healthy choices throughout their lives, and allowing them to become more whole persons.
For more information about Our Whole Lives or comprehensive sexuality education, visit http://www.ucc.org/justice/owl/, www.siecus.org, or www.advocatesforyouth.org.
October 17th, 2006 at 11:07 am
Ha! I thought you looked familiar Glen — I saw you at the sexual theology panel last month that UpNet put on. I chatted a bit afterward with you and Gina. I also heard you for a bit on KRCL where it was revealed that your nickname is the “King of Condoms”!
Small Lake City!
I agree with you that comprehesive sex education is a social justice issue. Too often sex is used as a weapon against certain segments of our society - to keep them in poverty, to keep them within their “proper” roles in society, and to deny them certain rights.
October 17th, 2006 at 3:15 pm
and what if as a guardian/parent of a child you are more concerned with other issues, and would like to leave sexuality education to the time when they believe they are ready for it? While I agree with the intent I certainly don’t want it to be written into law or done in a manner that would disrespect parental wishes.
If the parents aren’t involved in this process I am agreed that if kids want to know we should teach them.
Should Foley teach the page boys about how they should wrap up before servicing a congressmen? Should the “Jonbenet Carr guy” give advice to minors about how he views sexuality? How do we qualify people willing to give such advice or even provide a forum?
As a rule, this is some pretty thin ice, and since it is a private matter even our “good intentions” could cause alot of problems, just look at all the teachers/priests banging our kids.
Parental rights and family justice is already under assault by the society at large and another player in the game, even one that could do some good, should first know what the family situation is with regards to parents, and operate with the respect due.
I would never agree to an involunatary mandate for this process.
October 17th, 2006 at 7:03 pm
I haven’t read through the whole of Our Whole Lives, but it is really comprehensive from the stuff I have read. It’s so comprehensive that it helps the kids explore what is healthy and what isn’t — and that includes sexual advances from adults — and how they might respond to it.
With fear-based non-sex education, kids know so little that when they are apporached inappropriately by adults with predatory tendencies, they might not know what to do and tend to blame themselves, wondering if they are at fault. In fact, most of the situations you that you bring up Cassandra are more of a result of ignorance than of full knowledge of one’s body and choices. I know that most of the mistakes I’ve made with sexuality were due to either denial of what was natural or just plain ignorance and sometimes both.
At the Unitarian church the class is taught by both a male and female and several jr. high kids. No one is taught one on one. The parents are given a presentation on what will be taught and have to sign a consent form.
I am wholehearted interested in having my two kids take the class when they are of age. For hetero girls, I believe that such education can help prevent unwanted pregnancies and STDs. For hetero boys I believe that it can help them learn self-control and to consider issues from their partner’s perspective. For GLBT kids I it can help them to form a healthy self-image in a society that condems them. For all kids I think it helps them learn tolerance and understanding for those that are different than themselves.
October 18th, 2006 at 8:11 am
At the Unitarian church the class is taught by both a male and female and several jr. high kids. No one is taught one on one. The parents are given a presentation on what will be taught and have to sign a consent form.
Bingo! It isn’t up to you or society to make that decision, it is the perview of law abiding concerned parents. Whatever anyone thinks, it is the knowing which leads to the doing, and there is a time for being taught, and from what I see from this rather sick and misguided society, I don’t want anyone but me making that decision without parental consent. So good job getting the consent forms.
What is to say that if you train kids in “proper” sexual behavior, and they simply become safer subjects for adult perversion? What if the kids WANT to engage in what is perverse after you teach them? They see all day from our leaders, and god help us on TV. So I have no trust in your methodology.
The average age a kid loses their virginity in the US is 14. In Europe it is 17, education has a part to play in this good news, but it is ALWAYS with the consent of the parents which matter more than anyone, and supercede anyone elses “good intentions”.
As for kids and sexuality puh-lease, have you been watching any cable lately? I especially love the Girls gone Wild commericals that appear at 8:30 at night where I live. You get watch lesbian nubiles fondling each other for free. Great marketing, the lesbians get some and so do heterosexual males that seem to have a facination for girl on girl action.
What is “natural” is a purely a subjective issue. I mean in parts ofAfrica, for example, it is natural to cut out a girls clitoris, while Jews and many Gentiles have an abject fascination with the mutilation of the male penis.
Go figure, we need to help these poor people Jenni.