The radical overhaul of sex and relationships education (SRE) announced by the government last week is very good news. Children will learn about healthy adult relationships from the age of four and sex education will become compulsory in all secondary schools. So, good news – but also long overdue, given the challenges faced by the young.
Between a quarter and a third of 16- to 18-year-old girls have experienced unwanted sexual touching at school and three-quarters describe anxiety about harassment affecting their lives. And this is all against a wider backdrop of worsening unhappiness and self-esteem, which many link to social media pressures to perform, be constantly connected and look good.
In tandem with this, most young people (75%) rate the sex and relationships education they currently receive in a range between very bad and OK. There is scarce support to help them develop their understanding, skills and values around healthy sex and relationships. Instead, they are regularly exposed to societal messages and norms that promote bad sex, reduce their chances of happiness in relationships and increase the risk that they will experience, witness or perpetrate harassment and abuse.
Let’s take pornography. By the age of 15, two-thirds of young people in the UK have viewed it online. A recent study on free online porn found that 41% of sex scenes feature violence towards women and girls and 56% involve one person dominating another. Women and girls are typically neutral or positive in response to violence. Through subtle and not-so-subtle methods, the porn industry invites its viewers to indulge in sexual arousal around themes of dominance, control and crossing boundaries. It also asks its users to prioritise their arousal in sexual situations above and beyond their interest in other people’s (usually women’s) pleasure and wellbeing.
In conjunction with complementary messages from other parts of society, all this fuels expectations and ideas about sex that harm both girls and boys. Digital technology can also facilitate and encourage bullying, shaming and coercion. One study found that 44% of 14- to 17-year-old girls had sent a sexual image of themselves and, of these, 42% had had their image sent on to others without their consent. Almost all of those girls reported this as a distressing experience.
As part of an NSPCC-commissioned research team, I recently interviewed young people who had been sexually abused, the majority by male peers, with technology often playing a part. A difference, they thought, could have been made with substantive sex education, provided at an early age, and focused on relationship dynamics. They felt they had been offered too little, too late.
One girl said: “I had a consent talk when I was 16, and I [said], ‘If I’d have had this talk five years ago, you don’t understand what it would have prevented – you’ve done me a disservice by only telling me now’. I couldn’t even sit in the talk, I was so annoyed.” Her anger and distress at the lack of preventative help was echoed by others and starkly spoke to adult negligence.
Young people are acutely aware that their education is not preparing them to navigate relationships and sex in a digital world. I led a group discussion with teenage boys last week where they described some of the difficulties they faced: pressures from friends, bullying, insecurities. They questioned why schools were teaching them so many irrelevant things that even teachers didn’t seem to see the point in and not targeting relationship and digital skills and understanding.
If they’re to have in-depth education on these issues, what should it look like? Understanding what good relationships are is a start – ignorance about what’s healthy and what’s not lets peer-to-peer abuse flourish. One 18-year-old summed up the current failings thus: “They were just, like, ‘This is a condom – you should use one’. And, ‘This is what happens when you have a period’.”
Beyond a list of what’s OK and what’s not, given all the societal and peer pressures, young people need the space to work out what they really think, what their values are, what they want from their relationships and who they want to be. Maybe they’ve been hearing the messages that boys should always be “up” for sex, that for girls to be valuable they need to always look good and that sex is a game. But with time for reflection, they can ask: do we really think and want these things?
Empathy, self-reflection, media literacy and even moral philosophy can help young people work out their desires and their values and to develop positive identities. Complementing this work would be skills in communication, regulation of emotion and developing self-confidence. Interwoven with all this is a need to understand the motives and strategies of companies seeking to profit from making young people feel anxious. Good relationships aren’t separable from the rest of life.
In short, a wealth of evidence shows that good, properly resourced sex and relationship education delivered by well-trained people is highly effective. It is also most effective when part of a broader life-skills programme dedicated to preparing the young for the world of work and beyond. This holistic approach also avoids children being bombarded with numerous separate topics, as if they existed in silos – “mental health”, “drugs and alcohol”, “online safety”, “cyberbullying”. Instead, the goal is values-based decision-making that helps build resilience.
It’s a matter of rights and fairness that all children have access to this education (although the government is currently proposing some opt-out clauses for faith schools). And if properly delivered, we can expect lots of positive knock-on effects. It can help spark conversations between parents and children that both parties want to have but are not sure how to, and one young person’s good-quality sex education affects the wellbeing of the others around them.
The government has taken a momentous step. The next step is ensuring the critical details. Ideally, sex and relationship education must be available to everyone, should be well resourced and embedded within a wider curriculum. If we want young people to be happy – and actors in building a wiser society – nothing else is good enough.
Dr Elly Hanson is an independent clinical psychologist
View all comments >