Over the last week or so I have been preparing my first report due in for my PhD. However to prevent madness I have been keeping the occasional eye on twitter to remind me that there is a world outside. And so, even in my isolation I still heard about Nadine Dorries’ 10 minute bill on giving “empowerment to young girls” by teaching them abstinence. My immediate reaction to the tweets I saw and subsequent news articles I read was to think “you are a silly woman Nadine, with a highly flawed sense of logic” (although with much stronger language). However the skeptic on my shoulder reminded me that all I had read was second hand information and that maybe I should find out more, so I did.
For those of you who didn’t see her appearance on The Vanessa Show it is still available here (till the 21st May) and starts at about 1215 in. Firstly she seems to make sense, advocating teaching children about relationships rather than just how to put a condom on a banana. I certainly agree with this. Children should definitely be taught about relationships and love within their personal and social education. She continues to sound sensible as she defends that her proposals don’t exclude boys and that “abstinence” wasn’t a word she wanted to be used to describe her “just say no” idea. But here comes the first logic failure. As Vanessa babbles on about how children are already taught to say no, as in 5 year olds taught to say no if someone wants to touch them inappropriately or if someone tells them to keep it secret from their parents, Nadine agrees saying that evidence she “has heard is, that if a stronger just say no message was taught in school, there might be an impact on sex abuse because, a lot of girls, when sex abuse takes place don’t realise until later that that was a wrong thing to do…”. So what she is saying here is that if you teach young girls how to say no to sex, they will know they are being abused when they are already being abused. What good is that? Yes, children should be taught to recognise abuse if it is happening to them so that abuse doesn’t go unnoticed, but it does nothing to prevent the abuse happening in the first place. It places the blame squarely on the victim and not the abuser.
She then goes on to blame this lack of ability of a child to recognise abuse on society being over-sexualised; leaflets from NHS Sheffield teaching “an orgasm a day keeps the doctor away” (defended in the Sheffiled Telegraph by Steve Slack, director of the Centre for HIV & Sexual Health who produced the leaflet to be “designed to encourage young people to delay losing their virginity until they are sure they will enjoy the experience”), magazines aimed at 13 year olds featuring sexual positions and seven year olds being sold bikinis. What she seems to be saying here is that sex is seen as normal and therefore children do not recognise abuse as wrong. Again I agree that children should be able to identify abuse as something they should know is wrong to be happening to them and although I in no way claim to know how you teach young children this, surely it’s not all “society’s” fault. Surely some responsibility lies a little with parents to have a good relationship with their kids, to prevent them being exposed to inappropriate material and to protect them against abuse. Of course there are situations where no matter how good parents are, or well protected a child is, abuse can still happen. And that’s the point; it is the abuser who is at fault for the terrible act, not the victim.
She ends this section with “If we did empower this message into schools…we’d probably have less sex abuse”. So, she does think that teaching children to say no to sex = less abuse. As I said above there is no logical way to defend this, it’s absolute nonsense.
I won’t bore you with my thoughts on the rest of the programme, as you can watch if you’re interested, but included is a discussion on the lack of morals in today’s society and how it was different in the good old days when you knew who your vicar was.
You can also read a full text of Nadine’s prepared remarks of her Ten Minute Rule Bill here. Here she agrees with Dame Joan that women are crap at making decisions, “The pill allowed women to make choices for themselves, that meant the risk of making the wrong choice”. And she then cites the Daily Mail as evidence that society is saturated in sex.
She cites an article from The British Medical Journal to make her point that teaching teenagers about contraception doesn’t prevent pregnancy. 71% of teenagers in the study who got pregnant before the age of 20 had previously consulted a GP about contraception. She fails however to analyse the data, as the authors point out the fact that teenagers who ask for contraception advice may be doing so because they are already sexually active and therefore automatically more likely to become pregnant. Teenagers who are not sexually active on the other hand may be less likely to ask for contraceptive advice. I do not however want to dismiss the findings of the article as it certainly shows that contraceptive advice from a GP alone isn’t the answer to preventing teenage pregnancy.
She “believe[s] that the answer to ending our constant struggle with the incredibly high rate of teenage sexual activity and underage pregnancies lies in teaching our girls and boys about the option of abstinence from sex as part of their compulsory education at school”. Notice the word abstinence that she said she didn’t want used?
Towards the end, although being pretty good at citing the sources of her other information she says that “Study after study shows the great benefit of marriage” and advocates the choice of not having sex before marriage. Now, this is a choice, but in my opinion a pretty crappy one. Some people may be happy to wait to sign a bit of paper before jumping in the sack but I’ve always found the thought of waiting for marriage to have sex ludicrous. Sex is an important part of any loving adult relationship and marriage can be expensive, not to mention the cost of divorce if things go wrong. Despite my views this statement is just another way of telling teenagers not to have sex.
Now I’ve done a lot of moaning about what is wrong with Nadine Dorries’ thoughts on sex education but she’s not all wrong. Teenagers should be taught to wait till they’re ready to have sex and to know how to say no if they don’t want to. Maybe I was privileged. I knew I was ready to experience sex when I lost my virginity, I felt I knew enough about how to be safe and protect against pregnancy and disease and maybe more than anything I had an amazing group of friends and parents I felt comfortable talking about sex to. I also remember my sex education encompassing everything this debate talks about; how to be safe, how to say no and that ultimately the only 100% fool-proof way of not becoming pregnant was to not do it.
I don’t know the answer to the UK’s high teenage pregnancy rate and maybe sex education does need a shake up, but of this I’m pretty convinced: telling teenagers not to do something doesn’t stop them doing it. You were a teenager once Nadine, don’t you remember?
She then goes on to blame this lack of ability of a child to recognise abuse on society being over-sexualised; leaflets from NHS Sheffield teaching “an orgasm a day keeps the doctor away” (defended in the Sheffiled Telegraph by Steve Slack, director of the Centre for HIV & Sexual Health who produced the leaflet to be “designed to encourage young people to delay losing their virginity until they are sure they will enjoy the experience”), magazines aimed at 13 year olds featuring sexual positions and seven year olds being sold bikinis. What she seems to be saying here is that sex is seen as normal and therefore children do not recognise abuse as wrong. Again I agree that children should be able to identify abuse as something they should know is wrong to be happening to them and although I in no way claim to know how you teach young children this, surely it’s not all “society’s” fault. Surely some responsibility lies a little with parents to have a good relationship with their kids, to prevent them being exposed to inappropriate material and to protect them against abuse. Of course there are situations where no matter how good parents are, or well protected a child is, abuse can still happen. And that’s the point; it is the abuser who is at fault for the terrible act, not the victim.
She ends this section with “If we did empower this message into schools…we’d probably have less sex abuse”. So, she does think that teaching children to say no to sex = less abuse. As I said above there is no logical way to defend this, it’s absolute nonsense.
I won’t bore you with my thoughts on the rest of the programme, as you can watch if you’re interested, but included is a discussion on the lack of morals in today’s society and how it was different in the good old days when you knew who your vicar was.
You can also read a full text of Nadine’s prepared remarks of her Ten Minute Rule Bill here. Here she agrees with Dame Joan that women are crap at making decisions, “The pill allowed women to make choices for themselves, that meant the risk of making the wrong choice”. And she then cites the Daily Mail as evidence that society is saturated in sex.
She cites an article from The British Medical Journal to make her point that teaching teenagers about contraception doesn’t prevent pregnancy. 71% of teenagers in the study who got pregnant before the age of 20 had previously consulted a GP about contraception. She fails however to analyse the data, as the authors point out the fact that teenagers who ask for contraception advice may be doing so because they are already sexually active and therefore automatically more likely to become pregnant. Teenagers who are not sexually active on the other hand may be less likely to ask for contraceptive advice. I do not however want to dismiss the findings of the article as it certainly shows that contraceptive advice from a GP alone isn’t the answer to preventing teenage pregnancy.
She “believe[s] that the answer to ending our constant struggle with the incredibly high rate of teenage sexual activity and underage pregnancies lies in teaching our girls and boys about the option of abstinence from sex as part of their compulsory education at school”. Notice the word abstinence that she said she didn’t want used?
Towards the end, although being pretty good at citing the sources of her other information she says that “Study after study shows the great benefit of marriage” and advocates the choice of not having sex before marriage. Now, this is a choice, but in my opinion a pretty crappy one. Some people may be happy to wait to sign a bit of paper before jumping in the sack but I’ve always found the thought of waiting for marriage to have sex ludicrous. Sex is an important part of any loving adult relationship and marriage can be expensive, not to mention the cost of divorce if things go wrong. Despite my views this statement is just another way of telling teenagers not to have sex.
Now I’ve done a lot of moaning about what is wrong with Nadine Dorries’ thoughts on sex education but she’s not all wrong. Teenagers should be taught to wait till they’re ready to have sex and to know how to say no if they don’t want to. Maybe I was privileged. I knew I was ready to experience sex when I lost my virginity, I felt I knew enough about how to be safe and protect against pregnancy and disease and maybe more than anything I had an amazing group of friends and parents I felt comfortable talking about sex to. I also remember my sex education encompassing everything this debate talks about; how to be safe, how to say no and that ultimately the only 100% fool-proof way of not becoming pregnant was to not do it.
I don’t know the answer to the UK’s high teenage pregnancy rate and maybe sex education does need a shake up, but of this I’m pretty convinced: telling teenagers not to do something doesn’t stop them doing it. You were a teenager once Nadine, don’t you remember?
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