‘Marcus’ writes: ‘Peter Hitchens strikes again! Honestly! How could you possibly link paedophilia with teenage sex education? Are you totally mad? The purpose of sex education is to educate teenagers on the dangers of unsafe sex, the horror of STD's and to heighten awareness on the dangers which curious young people might encounter once they become sexually active. Peter Hitchens seems to think that by being educated on this subject then the student will become more susceptible to paedophiles.
'The idea that this man can write something so irresponsible is terrifying. Firstly, he is wrong. As we all know, sexual curiosity occupies many teenage minds and therefore surely it helps for them to know the facts. I was lucky enough to receive education on 3 major subjects aged 13; the first being drugs, the second being smoking and the third was sex. I never smoked, I never took drugs and when I eventually had sex for the first time, aged 16 ( and not with a paedophile, but instead with my girlfriend of 3 years) I was very grateful to firstly understand the importance of safety and responsibility but also because I had some idea of what I was doing.
'As a result, we didn’t end up with a teenage pregnancy on our hands and more importantly it did not put me, or my older girlfriend within the dangerous grasp of "sexual terrorists". Peter Hitchens - you seem to think that ignorance is protection. I think most intelligent people would argue the exact opposite. ‘
Before I answer this, I think it would be helpful to reproduce what I actually wrote, so that readers can easily refer both to the criticism and to the object of it.
Here it is : ‘The mystery of sex education is that parents put up with it at all. It began about 50 years ago, on the pretext that it would reduce unmarried teen pregnancies and sexual diseases. Every time these problems got worse, the answer was more sex education, more explicit than before.
Since then, unmarried pregnancies have become pretty much normal, and sexual diseases – and the ‘use’ of pornography – are an epidemic.
It is only thanks to frantic free handouts of ‘morning after’ pills and an abortion massacre that the number of teenage mothers has finally begun to level off after decades in which it zoomed upwards across the graph paper.
In a normal, reasonable society, a failure as big as this would cause a change of mind. Not here.
If you try to question sex education, you are screamed at by fanatics. This is because it isn’t, and never has been, what it claims to be. Sex education is propaganda for the permissive society. It was invented by the communist George Lukacs, schools commissar during the insane Hungarian Soviet Republic in 1919, to debauch the morals of Christian schoolgirls.
It works by breaking taboos and by portraying actions as normal that would once have been seen as wrong. Last week we learned that the Government has officially endorsed material which says sex at 13, ‘for those of similar age and developmental ability’, is normal.
This is, no doubt, a point of view. In a free society, people are entitled to hold it, even if it is rather creepy. But do you want your child’s school to endorse it? And how does it square with our incessant frenzied panic about child sex abuse?
If we are so keen on the innocence of the young – and I very much think we should be – then surely this sort of radical propaganda is deeply dangerous. We do not give schools this huge power over the minds of the young for such a purpose.
How odd it is that we teach 13-year-olds to go forth and multiply, but can’t somehow teach them their times tables. Shouldn’t it be the other way round?’
Thus, ‘Marcus’ opines that ‘Peter Hitchens seems to think that by being educated on this subject then the student will become more susceptible to paedophiles.’ It’s that word ‘seems’ again, so often used by people who seek to misrepresent what I say. He chooses to think I say this. But I don’t actually say this. ‘Marcus’ , having chosen to believe that this is what I have said, then pronounces this sentiment ‘terrifying’.
Actually, my only brief and indirect reference to ‘paedophiles’ is to ask ’ how does it (’sex education’) square with our incessant frenzied panic about child sex abuse?’
I ask the question because it seems interesting to me. In my lifetime, for good or ill (and I think it a mixed bag) attitudes towards sex have been utterly transformed. Pornography, once a matter of deep shame and disgust, has become big business, and people admit to ‘using’ it without shame. Oddly enough, the old claim that by releasing repressions it would improve sexual behaviour is now (understandably) forgotten and nevr made. Yet it was on this basis that the laws against it were dismantled.
The open discussion of sex in almost all circumstances, once wholly taboo, was first permitted and has since become almost compulsory. Sex outside marriage, once universally frowned on, has become normal and respectable. Official documents nio longer refer to 'husbands' or 'wives'. Much the same has happened to child-bearing outside marriage, now widely praised. Sexual diseases on the verge of eradication thanks to antibiotics and VD clinics, have now reached epidemic levels, sepcially in the form of genital herpes. Abortion, a crime in all but the most limited circumstances, has now become a form of contraception.
Pharmacists, once coldly disapproving of attempts by obviously unmarried people to buy contraceptives, must now supply morning-after pills free on demand to all without blinking. Etc etc. GPs and advice clinics merrily defy the wishes of parents by prescribing contraceptive pills to girls who are still living at home, Much of this revolution is described in detail in my book ‘The Abolition of Britain’. Whatever you think of it, it *was* a revolution, and the world is utterly different as a result of it. Personally, while I'm in favour of some aspects of it, I think it has done a great deal of damage because it has been so total and so rapid. I think people are permitted to have differing views on this, and even to criticise it, without being abused, denigrated as prudes or otherwise howled down.
Apart from rape, which I never discuss because reasoned argument about it is nowadays impossible, only one form of sexual activity is still universally disapproved of. This is the sexual abuse of the young by those older than them. If people want to understand what our pre-revolutionary society was like, then let them imagine that a similar level of disapproval was once directed at many sexual acts and attitudes which are now common and accepted, if not actually praised.
Having seen this transformation, I am forced to wonder if something similar might happen to the current (in my view perfectly correct) horror of paedophilia. People who wished to license such things were part of the original sexual revolution. At least one leading sexual revolutionary has made statements about the ‘positive nature of some child-adult sexual relationships’ and argued that ‘not all sex involving children is unwanted, abusive and harmful’.
Here’s the problem. Once the old Christian boundary has been abolished - under which all sex acts outside lifelong heterosexual marriage were morally wrong - we struggle to find a clear basis on which to decide what we will and will not approve. To say ‘But that’s just disgusting!’ isn’t enough. That’s what people used to say about lots of things we now applaud.
So we move on to the idea that the fundamental problem with ‘paedophilia’ is that the children involved are not giving consent. This isn’t a bad argument at first glance, but it has one or two faults. The age of consent is not universally agreed (differing as it does between countries). And in reality it’s on its way downwards at the moment. Officially, it’s now 16. But the material which caused me to write my article strongly suggests that this is a dead letter, and that 13 is the new minimum. I suspect that in 20 years or so, the ‘real’ age will be lower still. Also, if there is no arbitrary line, such as an age, who exactly decides what is and what is not legitimate consent? Yet we all know that the police and courts don't enforce that arbitrary line.
Now, let me quote again from my prominent sexual liberation campaigner (many of you will know who it is, but I named him prominently some time ago, and feel that was enough. I quote him now to show that such ideas do exist and are held by prominent people in our society). The person involved may have said openly what a lot of other sexual revolutionaries think in private, but have more sense than to say.
This person wrote: ‘The positive nature of some child-adult sexual relationships is not confined to non-Western cultures. Several of my friends – gay and straight, male and female – had sex with adults from the ages of nine to 13. None feel they were abused. All say it was their conscious choice and gave them great joy.’
It was after those words that he added:
‘While it may be impossible to condone paedophilia, it is time society acknowledged the truth that not all sex involving children is unwanted, abusive and harmful.’
Note that he places the earliest age for such things as nine. Nine.
Now, if 13-year-olds are able to consent to sex *with each other*, as the document seems to suggest is all right, I would like to know what (for a non-Christian secular relativist) the objective logical or moral barrier is which says they cannot consent to it with people older than themselves? For me, the very idea is straightforwardly wrong as well as repulsive. I am also a strong believer in what i think of as the Christian idea that childish innocence is a treasure to be preserved as long as possible.
We’ve seen enough horrors in the last century, when wars and their aftermaths have left huge numbers of children exposed to all the cruelties and rapacities of adult life, with horrible results for them. I suspect that Russia, to this day, suffers the legacy of the huge number of parentless children who roamed wild through the USSR after the Civil War. I think it likely that they grew up to be the terrifying criminals who populated the Gulags and were used by the authorities to prey on and kill political prisoners. Children need their period of innocence to learn how to be civilized. The longer that period is, the more civilized the country.
So it seems to me that , in a much more complex way than is allowed for by ‘Marcus’, the sexualisation of children at 13 runs contrary to our loathing of ‘paedophilia’. For me, that’s not a difficulty. I’m against sex at 13, and against paedophilia. I don’t think 13-year-olds can give true consent. I think all sex outside marriage is wrong, and I am governed by Our Lord’s saying (Mark 9.42) that ‘whosoever shall offend one of these little ones that believe in me, it were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and he were cast into the sea’.
But for the relativists, where’s the frontier? I believe that before horrible, prudish old Christianity came along, quite a lot of societies allowed the sexual exploitation and even prostitution of quite young children. I’m told it’s not unknown in some societies today.
But to return to ‘Marcus’, who says : ‘The purpose of sex education is to educate teenagers on the dangers of unsafe sex, the horror of STD's and to heighten awareness on the dangers which curious young people might encounter once they become sexually active.’
So he thinks. Well, a few years ago I was asked by the publishers Hodder Headline to contribute to a small volume on the subject (now almost wholly unavailable, alas), and spent some time researching the history of sex education. What I found was that sex education was indeed promoted as a way of protecting the young. But that from the moment it was launched, in the 1950s, it failed repeatedly to do what it claimed. Those things it was supposed to guard against rose exponentially after it was introduced. On the very kindest reading, that makes it an abject failure. I'd be grateful for some research to see if it might have *contributed* to these things , by giving official sanction to what had reviously been taboo. But I'm not aware of any , so can only speculate.
‘Marcus’ may be surprised to learn this, but even in the 1950s, people were able to find out quite easily how babies were made. In fact, this was evidently true even in the pre-TV dark age before then, or we would have died out, wouldn’t we? The idea that schools need to teach people how to have sex, or what results from it, is a self-evident absurdity so huge that nobody questions it.
What emerged from my researches was that the supporters of sex education were the same industry that supported the prescribing of contraceptive pills first to the unmarried and then to girls without their parents’ knowledge. And it was also the same industry which demanded that abortion should be unrestricted.
Oddly enough, similar agendas have been followed by revolutionary regimes (usually in their early dogmatic months and years before they begin to require cannon-fodder or factory fodder, and therefore need to raise the rate of reproduction, and also in their declining post-war years when they had destroyed family life but were unable to provide western levels of effective contraception. In the USSR, before the end, the number of abortions actually outnumbered live births (6.46 million to 4.85 million in 1990).
This is the price that radical utopians readily pay for the destruction of the stable married family, the principal obstacle and rival to state power in any advanced society, and also the place where people learn religion, and traditions such as patriotism, which Utopian liberals hope to stamp out.
As the late Helen Brook ( heir of Marie Stopes, in many ways) once so succinctly put it (in a letter to ‘The Times’ in February 1980 )‘ From birth till death it is now the privilege of the parental state to take major decisions – objective unemotional, the state weighs up what is best for the child’ .
‘From birth till death’, eh? That is what all this is really about – the replacement of individual parents by the utopian parental state. If that doesn’t worry you, then you lack imagination.
Some of you might be interested in an earlier article I wrote on this subject here:
http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2008/03/they-ban-father.html
http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2008/03/they-ban-father.html