BEYOND THE BIRDS AND THE BEES: MODERN SEX ED

[Music] thank you I'm absolutely delighted that the Battle of ideas has put this session on Modern sex education on the agenda because I think it's a huge topic of great controversy at the moment and it's one of these issues that has changed so much over the years when I first started working in sexual and reproductive Health in uh around 1990 my first job was for the Family Planning Association at a time when they were campaigning for better sex education in schools and the hilarious thing about it then was that that really was a time where lots of schools simply didn't have biological sex education mission in schools I remember some of the um the talks that I would do then involved um you know I was using examples where schools had stuck together the pages in the biology books in the libraries to stop kids from accessing them and looking at naughty words around reproduction I remember the the director of The Family Planning Association would talk about her sex education at school so she was a generation older um and she talked about being taught to knit a uterus that she could then push a ball of wool through to learn about how birth happens so that was a kind of starting point back then and there was a bit of an issue of changing from sex education SE to SRE which was about bringing relationships into sex education making it not just about biology but also making it about relationships and that was really um a bit of a concession at the time to get parents to buy in to sex education it was look we're not just talking about the mechanics of sex we're talking about relationships as well now how far have we gone in that period of time um and I've been completely out of it since my lad is now 27 yesterday and has actually been sharing some of the sessions here so my Notions of what sex education are a little bit out of date so I'm really glad to be catching up on some of the uh controversies that are going on we've got a great platform unfortunately we don't have Ryan Christopher from The Alliance democracy and freedom because he's uh got a migraine and can't uh speak and so instead we have Nancy McDermott who's filling in at the very last minute who's written a load of stuff about the family and parenting and can talk a little bit about what's going on particularly in the state where she's from so we're putting her to good use we have Millie Hill who's going to speak first who is real Kick-Ass feminist campaigner and author of a number of books on pregnancy birthing she's recently got into a lot of trouble on the sex education point but she can explain about that we have uh Stephanie Davis arai who is from transgender Trends which is an organization that campaigns for evidence-based health care and science-based education and Josephine Hussey who is a primary school teacher and has also written quite a lot on the family and parenting and all of that kind of stuff so we're going to start with Millie and then Josephine and then Stephanie and then Nancy so Millie over to you thank you um well thanks for the introduction and um just to briefly say I haven't really planned to talk about um the the hot water that I've been in but just to just to Briefly summarize it um in case you're now really curious um I I am the author of two books about pregnancy and one book for young girls about periods and I became one of these uh canceled women um uh or Australian Norton which put it I was held accountable because I uh you know being involved in the world of maternity I I got involved in the discussion around the use of uh ideological language like birthing people um and I got accounts anyway moving on so I'm a writer and I'm a mum also three kids age 14 12 and 9. and I talk to my children about sex periods relationships the correct names for their body parts I've written a mainstream book for 9 to 12 year old girls about periods in puberty and this includes a diagram of the vulva an explanation of sex and conception contraception a full diagram of the clitoris which I was adamant had to be in there and an explanation about masturbation so maybe what I'm trying to say is I'm not a prude and yet this is how people who raise concern concerns about child protection and safeguarding are often framed this is a safeguarding issue in itself we must always be able to openly discuss concerns and raise questions that is part of how safeguarding works I'd like to talk about boundaries prior to Motherhood and becoming a writer I trained and worked as a creative arts psychotherapist in therapy in particular boundaries are something you are trained to understand and see as utterly vital this extends into small details such as time keeping your therapy sessions perfectly your clients know when they have 10 minutes left and you hold the shape of time in the space for them this makes them feel contained and safe it is also the role of the parent to offer a container for emotions to be the person who holds to have an awareness of the lines and of the edges so that the child or the therapy client feels in safe hands when we create educational materials for children and young people we need to have an awareness of boundaries we might call this deciding what is age appropriate and this is what the government guidelines call it we expect adults in particular those who are charged with the care and education of children to have some inner sense of right and wrong or moral compass when it comes to deciding what is age-appropriate and as parents we also have to do this and people will differ to a certain extent the refrain in our house is often all my friends are allowed fortnight um but I think we've currently lost a bit of our grip on this common sense we've lost our grip on boundaries in our admirable attempts to treat children with the respect and autonomy that they were denied in previous generations we've lost track of the boundary between child and adult it's very important for children to know that the adults are in charge even if they protest against this they secretly like it because it makes them feel safe and contained children ask to be given power to make all the decisions but they don't really want it and if they get it it terrifies them I have personally worked with children in therapy who have been left to their own devices in a variety of ways without an adult to guide them and hold the boundaries in extreme forms we call this child neglect period which is for 9 to 12 year old girls about periods of menstruation I had to hold very firmly to the boundaries in terms of what I was prepared to include or not include as the writer of an educational resource for 9 to 12 year old girls I had a responsibility to ensure the book was evidence-based and age-appropriate this meant not saying it's not just girls who have periods as I was asked to do this doesn't mean that we shouldn't talk to our children about the concept of gender identity the problem is that educational resources for children including many many children's books and of course School resources are becoming increasingly ideological and are presenting ideology as fact my Publishers who are part of major publisher hashat called in the school of sexuality education as sensitivity readers for the book for those who are not aware the school of sexuality education were part of the team behind the family sex show um do you remember that his website pitched as a resource for young people included a glossary of terms for the theater this is a great example of lack of boundary is it the glossary included theatrical terms such as stage left and Stage right and Green Room alongside words such as Kink and pegging I refuse to have the school of sexuality education a sensitivity readers for my book but another author who did not have these issues so much on her radar might well have gone along with it and who knows what they may have suggested for my book about periods for nine-year-olds more recently I've written for the Daily Mail about sex education in schools and some of the resources that are being used like the school of sexuality education dictionary these resources and their creators don't have a very good understanding of boundaries and what is and isn't age-appropriate external agencies who provide materials to our schools almost all ideologically captured and are presenting gender identity theories as fact to children the sort of sex ads who claim they've delivered workshops to over 67 000 secondary age children apparently acknowledging their lessons that not all people with vaginas are female and penis does not equal male this is against the department for Education guidance that resources should be evidence-based while writing my article for the mail I also heard from parents who have been denied access to the teaching materials that are being used in their children schools one provider jigsaw was also very reluctant to share them with me there are many many examples of school sex ed resources that are either age inappropriate or not evidence-based the proud trust for example has a poster and book about an Alien Nation where a pink planet girl a blue planet boy and a non-binary planet are and it asks children what planet were you sent to as a baby so schools are also taking part in schemes such as the rainbow flag award and Stonewall schools Champions which are encouraging schools to introduce gender ideology in order to win marks and certificates just like the well-known Stonewall diversity Champions scheme businesses one mum told me her primary age children put their pronouns on their classroom drawers besides their names it's really great I think that we're talking about this today because like I said safeguarding depends upon us having open conversations about these matters and just finally I'd just like to briefly say something that is just a bit of a kind of curveball a little bit wider about education as a whole from the perspective of a parent I just feel that education has become very disembodied in the past 10 20 years I've seen three of my children go through a state primary school and I have to say I don't think there's enough Movement Dance drama play time even the lunch hour isn't an hour anymore there's not enough sensory play there's not enough free art making where they don't get told do this but they just get given materials to explore there's not enough outdoor time and there's not enough nature being taught you know teaching children showing them taking them out showing them getting their hands in the dirt I sat at desks too much from a young age rather than exploring the world through play and creative expression and I can't help but think there could be a role for schools and giving children more opportunities to be embodied connect to Nature and play in the world in which so much time is on special screens and technology and it's distancing them from biology and reality I do think that there are relationships between all of the problems that we have been discussed over the weekend in terms of gender ideology climate change um you know the way we're becoming more distance from our physical selves and I think that they the education could play a role in that in terms of helping children to reconnect with their actual what's below their neck thanks and I have to explain to me what pegging is after them how do I follow that when considering sex education for children I think we have to consider two factors firstly how children develop their understanding of the world and their thinking and secondly the world in which children live the context for their understanding Piaget and vygotsky two prominent pioneers of Child Development considered her children's thinking developed they agreed that children went through stages of development but differed in that Piaget saw children as scientists who developed their thinking and then applied it to the world vygotsky understood that children made meaning through their social interaction for Piaget children are self-directed Learners vygotsky agreed but placed more emphasis on social contributions to learning the godsky understood more the dialectical nature of Children's Learning and Development I gave this as background but it's important that the way children's thinking develops is scientifically researched and understood throwing Concepts around can confuse the development of their thinking if they're not ready to take on board these new Concepts particularly if they're alien to their own experiences both Piaget and fugotsky believe that children develop schemas to make sense of their world categories that they understand new learning is considered through those categories and absorbed they change the child's thinking but until the child can organize their thoughts and have the experience of maturity to make sense of the new learning it could result in what is called this equilibrium this is very important children are not just small adults the way they think is fundamentally different turning now to what we're talking about today researchers have found that very early on children develop schemas around the concept of what is a boy and what is a girl to help them make sense of the world in some ways young children's gender stereotypes may be the result of an effort to simplify a very complex world young children hold such strong stereotypes about gender precisely because having highly structured Notions of what boys and girls do and like helps them to make sense of the world around them so when a researcher presents a five-year-old with a counter stereotypical boy for example who likes to play with toy prams the five-year-old might still predict that the boy would prefer to play with airplanes than with dolls similarly researchers have found that young children often distort memories of counter stereotypical images so that they conform to a gender stereotype for example they might see a picture of a girl saw in wood but later remember it as a picture of a boy saw him wood as they grow older however children become able to hold a more complex and sophisticated view of the world and can therefore recognize that stereotypes do not apply in that way to everyone psychologists initially thought that it's not until the final stage when they have a full understanding of gender is permanent that children start to grow a strong motive motivation to discover an adult masculine and feminine stereotypes since then however research has shown that children actively begin to seek out information about what it means to be a boy or a girl as soon as they're able to label themselves and others as male or female accurately in other words from around three years of age children are themselves motivated to find out about masculine versus feminine toys activities behaviors and occupations it's obviously important to challenge the stereotypes children develop but also important that they can deal with the development of these categories or schemas without ending in a constant state of this equivalent whatever that word is children are very self-centered and it's not until they're older that they can understand abstract motions or other viewpoints this thinking develops towards the end of primary school and it's in this context that schools have to consider what is taught in Sex and relationship education in my view most primary schools in the main do that very well in the relationships part of their education primary schools teach children that there are many forms of relationships and Families this works children can see them in the world that they live in children have experienced themselves or via their friends of same-sex relationships one parent families Etc explaining to children that this is normal and focusing on the importance of healthy relationships in my view should not necessarily be controversial our job as teachers is to educate children about how the world is now not how we would like it to be when it comes to sex education itself the teaching is mainly biological it starts with naming body parts in reception moving on to the middle period of primary school explaining how amazing our bodies are and what they can do to Upper key stage two which is what I teach the teaching of biological facts and preparing children for puberty so where is the controversy stemming from it does not stem necessarily from what schools are teaching but rather from the discussions that are taking place in and around them a number of ngos are circling schools pushing their agenda and due to the unresolved nature of the discussion in society some Educators feel ill-equipped to untangle such topics secondary schools have a completely different experience of which I have less knowledge but because we live in a world where trans issues are in the public eye and secondary school children explore those when exploring who they want to become the pressure on secondary schools is intense very young children worries over what they may take from drag queen story times and other such events around parents Minds I think it's important that we understand understand what I said at the beginning of this introduction about children's thinking and how they make sense of the world I would like sex education in Primary School in particular to remain as it is however if children experience drag queen story time um and it's delivered appropriately and the story is about difference then they will work through their schemas to make it make sense as one drag artist reported on women's hour at the end of the story time a child came up to him and said that was fun but are you a boy or a girl don't however get me started on pronouns that it's interesting isn't it with a pronoun thing I always thought that maybe initially there was something positive about the pronoun discussion in that it might at least teach young people something about the construction of grammar and what a noun and a pronoun was but I think it's gone beyond that now Stephanie I'm going to talk um about gender ideology gender identity ideology as it relates to the rshe curriculum I started transgender Trend in 2015 and back then there was already material on how to change the biology curriculum in schools to be trans inclusive and I saw a slide presentations and I think we haven't quite seen that yet the biology curriculum itself I think it's remained relatively untouched but the ideology has come in through RSE education and when I say gender identity ideology I mean a set of beliefs that children are being taught in school as fact and previously this material came into schools through an anti-bullying under the anti-bullying umbrella despite the fact that the trans activists are the most bullying group that I've certainly I've experienced in this and the um controlling of people's language and people's beliefs is the most sort of repressive and bullying system I could think of they've also come in under the sort of Smashing gender stereotypes umbrella and again it despite being an ideology that reinforces those stereotypes and in fact deifies them and uses them even as definitions of boys and girls girls of the feminine passive ones who love pink and boys are the aggressive um characters who love blue um and children are being taught that this is reality so we've had a new definition of what what a boy is and what a girl is through this teaching we've seen an explosion of new resources and new groups teaching this ideology through the RSE curriculum now and some of this material is put out by the um by established providers the pshe association for example um and it's become part of the established sex providers material and it's called inclusive sex and relationships education and by inclusive they mean the inclusion of trans ideology in place of biological facts so the RSE curriculum according to the government is supposed to be age-appropriate factually biologically factually correct and relevant and I won't go into I mean I I think that there's a lot to say about the current RSE curriculum actually and I think the culture in which this generation are growing up in needs to be taken much more seriously um so porn culture and social media culture in particular how ideas are spread how I how images are spread and the effect that it's having on on this generation I don't think has been looked at seriously enough and that I think we're we're Way Beyond saying oh you know porn is okay but it's not real life that's not good enough I think we we know the harms it creates particularly for girls um we only have to look at the everyone's invited website to see and we know now about the endemic sexual harassment and abuse of girls even in schools now so we really need to look and help children to look at what messages the um the online porn they're viewing is communicating to them to Boys in their attitudes to girls and to girls in their feelings about themselves uh so anyway I'm not going to talk about that anymore I'm going to talk about gender identity uh in order to include gender identity you have to deny sex the two can't co-exist if a boy is a boy because of a gender identity then biological sex is irrelevant um however if a boy is a boy because he's male then individual identity is irrelevant the two cannot coexist we have to choose one or the other currently what's happening is the biology or the the rshe curriculum is contradicting the biology curriculum in what children are learning and this is from primary schools onwards the resources being produced are for little children who have not yet learned to distinguish between fantasy and reality um and have not yet discovered that biological sexism is an immutable stable characteristic that cannot and will not change throughout your lifetime so these ideas are abstract ideas are introduced to children at an age before they as was previously mentioned believe that children that boys and girls are gender stereotypes essentially um and in other words it's a sort of four-year-old you know gender identity ideology is a sort of four-year-old's understanding um we get on to Secondary School and the material goes into the kind of sexual practices that um many reference pegging I don't know what that is there's a lot of things that I know I don't know what they are that are being introduced inevitably sex work has been introduced as um as normal and um not not not questioned um BDSM Kink and how this has happened we've what we've seen is LGB being extended to LGBT and that being extended to lgbtq plus and lots of other initials as well and we haven't stopped to ask what the TQ plus means and what particularly what the TQ plus means for children and in fact what what it does mean there are various definitions of queer that we find but basically it's people with sexualities that could be considered outside the normal so that could include anything and that is why these extreme sexual practices have been gradually drip drip dripping into the rshe curriculum but they cannot be questioned because we have a very strong culture now of equality diversity and inclusion and again that may what that means is trans inclusion and that means the Erasure of biology inevitably I would like to see um because I've become quite suspicious of those words you know unfortunately diversity equality and inclusion and I'd like to see the the RSA he curriculum focus on boundaries privacy and consent and those are the factors that are important for children and for adolescents in particular trying to navigate this over-sexualized hyperplornified world that they're growing up in they need to have help to recognize that that is their culture and they need to be able to critically examine it as consumers of that culture and they're the first generation really that have been asked to do that job in such an extreme culture um so essentially what the inclusive sex and relationships education curriculum does is it confuses children about biological sex it blurs the boundary between male and female between the two Sexes it makes children not confident of using the correct biological terms which they need in order to report abuse and in order to understand themselves and their own bodies and how their bodies function um it imposes an ideology onto children in place of knowing biological facts all of these issues are massive um red flags in the safeguarding of children and young people and they have not been addressed because of a culture of silencing any questioning of this debate and young people are learning now online in The Wider culture through social media through mainstream media like BBC ITV Channel 4 and now in schools that it is bigoted to question or to ask any questions in this area and that is part of children's education and we now find that they are policing each other as they have learned from the culture to judge anybody who raises any questions about it as bigots so I'm very glad this debate is happening today when I set up transgender Trend it was one of my biggest aims that if the subject is children and young people and any group is saying no debate that is a huge safeguarding red flag for the protection of children everything is Up For Debate [Applause] I think the the point on the blurring of distinctions between girls and boys is a really interesting one to look at I had a very funny encounter with two little girls in a shop in the town where I live and as he'd have noticed I don't have any hair I have alopecia and these two girls and you know one was four one was six and the six-year-old asked me what had happened to my hair and I said oh uh there was something a bit wrong and it fell out and then the little one said but are you still a girl though and it was quiet and think yeah I'm still a girl nothing else has changed but it's interesting when you think about that kind of the fluid notion that they've got that something like even your hair changing might challenge your your body Nancy right well I I really uh agree with that and um I mean I guess the thing that strikes me about this um all of this is that it represents such an invasion an adult invasion of childhood um and I want to give you a couple of examples I mean one of the one of the uh things that always strikes me is that because adults are so invested in identity and sex is at the middle of identity um it's so easy for uh teachers to believe that they are helping children to understand their identity to develop their identity and so when a child innocently um uh makes a remark about what they like what they don't like the teacher feels or the adult feels that they have to affirm that because they're affirming identity and I think it would help if we were much clearer that identity is something for adults identity is something that we can only develop on as adults in relationship to other people so that's one example um the other thing is that I think kids have their own way of understanding things so um uh in Rochester I recently came across one of the a woman whose daughter was in kindergarten because I have to say introducing sex education really early is what is going on in the states right now who had been sick during the sex and gender lesson and so she she went in and all of the kids kind of surrounded her and they said you're gay and she said oh uh so she went home and she said Mommy what's gay well she said Mommy she's in the states and her mother is a um is a uh sort of a Pentecostal um uh black Christian mom and she just went what and took her child out of the school um because she you know because she she uh it was just so out of out of left field for her but I think it also I mean it just shows that that you know well what does gay mean to a child who you know isn't even sexually mature I mean there used to be um a uh a sense that in childhood there could be a latent period And I have you will know who said this but I can't remember um I think it might have been Eric Erickson where you know sex just isn't on the agenda but that of course doesn't mean that children aren't curious about sex um I think they are but but they explore in a very Fantastical way so you know I can remember in my own childhood being at you know six or seven you would talk about sacks and boobies and you know and and all that was very innocent um and uh I I was struck listening to gender a wider lens which is the best podcast in the world and you have if you haven't listened to it you should start it episode one and do every single one um but uh they were um speaking with a young woman who had detransitioned and she was talking about um how when she was you know 14 or 15 online there was this very playful almost like a sort of fan fiction uh kind of imagination of what it would be like to be a boy and it really struck me that that is something that she's doing at 15 or 16 and we did it six or seven and I think the reason why we were able to do it at six or seven and to you know get to it at our own pace is that we didn't didn't have adults imposing their agenda on us and I think that's the second aspect of the adult Invasion hood of child invasion of childhood is that I I think a lot of this is about adults trying to solve adult problems through the education of children you know take the question of trans inclusion first of all is trans inclusion really a problem and even if trans inclusion is a problem why would it occur to you that the way to solve that problem is to talk to is to talk to Primary students about trans people you know perhaps you should let them mature and then you know and do with that when it's uh when it's more appropriate um the um the other thing is I actually think that sex education um has something has gone awry even with old older kids so when I was researching my book about parenting I started looking at sex education and there was an educator at a private school in Philadelphia I believe and he was kind of glorified as the kindly gay Uncle you know who is saying the things that everybody's too embarrassed to say and his curricula included things like the sex Pizza where you have a pizza and you choose you know what are your favorite things to have on the pizza which has now been sort of uh disseminated through lots of schools and has been controversial because you know the sex people the pizza the sex Pizza is being given to 10 year olds um but but he also you know he had things like the optional film of female ejaculation um and in and and the thing about it was is that you know you have we seem to have create created a generation of young people who know a lot about the the sort of techniques of sex the varieties of sex but are terrified of intimacy um and so you get this kind of weird disconnect where you know you're in college and you're trying to avoid the feels but then you start to get the feels and you you develop emotions for someone who you're having sex with but they don't develop emotions for you and you feel violated um and so you know someone will say well that's sexual assault so it's very you know it's very very muddy and it's a it's a it's a situation um that that we have that we have largely created um and so I guess I guess if if that would be my starting point oh this one other thing I wanted to mention which is the binary on which is uh uh you hear the you sometimes hear the slogan break the binary and teachers say I'm going to break the binary but I actually think the binary is necessary I think the binaries is necessary as a kind of an anchor point a starting point for Child Development because when you think about it even if you're gender non-conforming you are relating to that binary you're defining yourself against it um and once you have that starting point um it there's no reason why you have to stick with that so it's a little bit like learning the mechanics of language you know it becomes more sophisticated um the the uh the more you learn about it and the older you get but eventually you know when you become an adult when you develop your identity when you have your own special view of the world you can write poetry with it and I think that that is what we should be aiming with with our kids okay um so who would like to ask something three years ago I was on a panel here really similar to this and passionately making the argument for sex education um I was working up for Brooke at the time which is the biggest most influential um charity for young people's Sexual Health um the atmosphere in the room it was a very heated debate and most of the room was on my side of the argument which I think is really interesting I feel like today it might not be the case but I'm interested to see how it goes I've left the field for a few reasons um but one of the reasons was the content and how it was changing and the kind of things that I had to go into schools and teach um firstly there was a kind of instagramization of sexual health um lots of influences were sort of coming into the scene it was a very popular thing to speak about and it became very sound bitey and it was more ideological than factual a small example which might seem to real was that we uh well my colleagues started to call masturbation solo sex and I had to fight really hard to be like it's not solar sex it's masturbation it's not sex because there are such bigger consequences to sex and I can't go and teach kids that it's a type of sex you know um there was the worry um that things weren't evidence-based as well even the stuff that I do believe in the the really important parts of sexual health the you know condom promotion and all of that it's quite difficult to get data on how effective it is even though I still do think it is uh necessary um and then obviously yeah as we've all mentioned I was getting more uncomfortable with the things that I was being asked to teach about in terms of gender identity I felt I couldn't teach it with Integrity anymore um I still believe in sex ed um sexual reproduction and sexual and Reproductive Rights really important people need to know that they can access things free and confidentially if they have to Anatomy specifically female anatomy it's surprising how many girls still think that their dinosaurs are disgusting and will scream when you put a anatomical picture of a vulvar up and I also would teach adult professional women who didn't understand how their bodies work so they thought they peed through their vaginas Etc and that has quite a big impact um targeted work so I'm not going into schools and teaching 30 kids but we did targeted work with individuals maybe they had learning disabilities they would cross other people's boundaries or you know they might end up in the criminal justice system for doing something that they didn't fully understand we would educate those people and hopefully they wouldn't commit a crime and you know end up um being prosecuted and then as is it Stephanie you said about decoding the online World um the 2020 statutory guidance actually um the reasoning for it at the beginning said you know this guidance hasn't been updated in 20 years um and young people are increasingly living their lives online so I think there was good intentions there and they recognized that we're in this Pond saturated world and all these young people um are having to deal with that um and you know I'm not exaggerating if you're going to be year seven class now and ask people about the things that they've seen in Plants they'll tell you about the incest Pond that they've seen um these are really young children who were saying this um so yeah I think those are the things that I think are important and I would like to see Stephanie you said a little bit about what you think good RSC should be the rest of the panel I just wanted to ask you what do you want RSC to be about we've said you know that we the things we don't want in it but it'd be really good to hear which bits you think are important if any I think sociologically you've kind of got this weird Paradox at the minute where on the one hand you've got children being treated as little adults are very mature and can tell adults what they should be teaching and that you know there's this reverse socialization but then on the other hand I've experienced it at University you've got an infantilization of University students so I'm at the University of Kent it was in the news last year for its expected spect modules and that told us um various things about how the world is and that if you're outside of that you're wrong about gender sexuality ages and racism etc etc um any League next door was very vocal about that and got various things try to get very soon into the point that there's now a section on challenging conversations that they verbatim say are like colds everyone catches them and everyone has to kind of go along with them but no one wants them um and there's kind of this teaching trying to teach the University students who are at that point adults and I wonder what the panel thought on that and then also so and kind of anecdote I've had similar things about my hair and about how I dress in quite a masculine way and my cousin and various other children saying were you a boy now and I think that there's this really interesting in position of the state in areas that would have previously been carried out by wider Society just through interaction and I wonder if the panel could maybe discuss why they think that's now deemed inadequate and why learning through interaction is no longer enough and why the state needs to get involved in that um I wanted to talk a little bit about the porn industry and then the relationship with from four and then the sex ed because I think doesn't matter what you teach in schools the kids gonna watch porn they know more about sex or or maybe the pseudo sex of the reality that we see the porn industry and they know far more than the the Educators even about about those kind of those condos those sides of it and is there a possibility of talking about filtering porn so so kids don't access to that and have like uh go towards actual sex or or actual education of sex in the United States um in a number of school districts parents have campaigned and protested over children's books are available in the library like uh depicted uh illustrations that are quite sexually graphic and in some of those campaigns that has been successful where those materials were removed the liberal establishment in the United States and many Democrat politicians have sought to cast that those campaigns as censorious as Banning books and I'm curious what your responses to that and what other metrics to determine what what is where's the line between age-appropriate versus um censorship well I think that's a really good question um your your last question there where's the line between age appropriate and censorship um and what's you know there's been a really interesting uh conversation in in the past week or so around the charity mermaids um and one of the uh people working for the charity uh guy called Darren new has been all over Twitter and he's lost his job it's no longer working for them because he was um I think it's got to be seen in context there are other concerns around the safeguarding uh mermaids um which led up to this but then he was exposed as having been involved in pornographic images and it's I think it's a really interesting question to ask you know is that okay why isn't it okay for someone who's working with children to have also made pornographic images so I'm just throwing that question out there because it's my my gut reaction to it was oh my God I wouldn't want that man anywhere near my children when I saw the pictures but then I thought about it and I thought well why not because just because you have a um your sexuality and you want to express yourself in that way in your adult's time doesn't necessarily mean that you are I'm being devil's advocate here I know some people agree disagree but throwing it out there it kind of chimes in with your point I think a little bit about uh censorship um and you know what's acceptable and what isn't acceptable um and I think we all need to start I think another point I want to make is that we do all need to really start thinking about these questions and some of the questions are difficult to think about because we go oh well I don't really want to know what pegging is and porn my God I'm sure my children aren't watching us and you know we we can't we don't want to go there but I think in the world that we're living in as parents and as the adults in the room at the moment in this point in history we need to actually face it head on and start actually thinking you know look at the picture of Darren Mew and ask yourself why is you know what you know face up to it um and and in terms of what's being included in RSC which was the one of the first questions I think um I did want to say that I agree with everything you said the lady in the um red dress at the back um and uh one thing that I would say is I would love to see included is you know in terms of from a feminist perspective I'd love um girls to be taught more about Cycles rather than just periods um and for the some of the negativity and the stigma around periods to be challenged um I think many of us don't realize how much negativity and stigma we carry around the female body but if you I won't ask you to to answer this question but you it might be interesting to think people in this room you know what do I do about my period products if I'm if you're a parent in a mum in a house with children or in any context how do you feel about your period of blood do you sort of double flush so that nobody sees it do you keep your pain is hidden away in your family home for example I think these are these are also questions that as the teachers and the adults we need to think about if we're going to teach sex ed we need to come to terms with our own relationships to our sex bodies and our in this case our female bodies our blood um and then because what can what can happen with teaching about periods is it's taught in that very clinical way where it's slightly sort of like ooh you have this thing sorry girls it's not very nice you know it comes once a month this is the tampon this is a pad and that's that's the messaging is very you know negative whereas and also there's a lot of anxiety around telling girls about fertility for example um and you know the pill Etc is a whole nother conversation we could have um so I think just being more just facing up a little bit more of these issues to our own responses to all of these issues and bringing those into our relationships with our children as teachers or parents and you know opening up the conversation I think it's a really tricky one that question of censorship like we will censor the things we don't like but you can't censor the things that um so um the word that I think we always need to apply to Children again there's words that I've become very suspicious of when they're applied to Children which is agency and autonomy and they're you know their positive words and we really do need to understand that children have rights to more agency and autonomy as they grow up and be sensitive to that but on the other hand we are we we have kind of reverse positions where children are now the adults and the adults of the children we have this idea all children are you know know so much more about gender than we do all of these new words and these new identities I didn't know a thing and look you know without considering where they're learning this from and who is invested and has an agenda in in teaching them this stuff we have to take back a composition as adults and let children be children because that they need to have childhood you know they're not adults yet and um and now you know our you know I'm talking about hours parents teachers um professionals society as a whole has a role to protect the vulnerable in society and there's no no one more vulnerable than a than a child and the word we need to apply to anything when we look at is this appropriate for children is the word safeguarding so it's almost safeguarding is sort of separate from all of the other issues about censorship even about equality law and you know any any kind of laws and policies safeguarding has to come first when it's children so we should question uh you know drag queens for example on the basis of safeguarding what does what's the message to Children what is it likely to you know and and every you know the books for children the books for early years and primary um about and and it's interesting that the books that are about homosexuality or tend to be set in the adult World there are about two mummies or two daddies or kings and queen queens or um and the books about trans are all about children or about little animals that don't have genitals um so it the the trans material is really targeted at children and the youngest children as I counted over this is a couple of years ago I got to over 30 books for the um early years in primary and I you know and there seems to be a recent explosion in those books so it's looking at age-appropriateness but safeguarding has to be the first thing we look at is this going to keep children safe or is it going to um cause them harm or create a more danger for them okay it's got some more questions in it's quite a short session so annoyingly you'll have to be brief what I would be particularly interested in is whether anybody thinks we're leaning too far in this discussion because whether this is all a bit of a moral Panic about an outfit who's qualified to teach it teaches they've got the developmental understanding of what a child is but do they have the understanding of the biology of it usually comes down to the poor biology teacher I don't know in primary if it always ends up with one teacher but a lot of teachers are really uncomfortable around this subject and so it's gone now to private companies I think half of the problem with this is it's gone out to private companies and to Lobby groups and we don't have anyone who's actually got all the pieces of the puzzle who actually is where's the body of knowledge around this and so it's being infected from a lot of different sort of views from lobbyists from corporate interests so I think we need to develop that I don't think myself as a conservative particularly but I know that in the US there's been this sort of homeschooling Drive partly after the pandemic partly because of concerns around what's being taught and I'm listening to stuff thinking God like stuff being taught to three-year-olds or whatever it just sounds like an absolute Nightmare and if I had kids maybe I would homeschool so my question is like why do schools think this is their responsibility when I think back to my own sex ed we did periods in year six and then at Secondary School it was a lot of stuff about AIDS which frankly was terrifying and I think it more harm than good and I you know I remember I had to do an AIDS test before I got a job like the EU and I was like terrified before I got it back even though it wasn't really much chance of of it really but you know I was absolutely terrified because of all the stuff I've been exposed to as like a 14 year old and I just think I know some parents won't do a good job uh and the porn thing is something luckily I wasn't exposed to and so that's something we need to think about but and and then we won't have to worry about all of these kind of private sector people circling who may or may not have the best interests of kids at heart Etc I just wanted to I I kind of want to disagree a bit as well I mean you know I teach in a primary school I did quite a lot of research to see what was being taught in primary schools across the country I picked areas that I knew of very high LGBT and in the main they were teaching the same as me so um I don't see you know these books floating around the schools in primary schools at the moment and I do think um the point that the girl made just um just a minute ago is an interesting one because I'm I'm a parent too my daughter's now 18. but I I thought actually I want to teach sex education to my daughter I don't actually want schools to teach sex education and it's here at the moment um and we do have a duty to teach it responsibly I never say sorry guys sorry guys you're going to have a period and it's really Aki or anything like that and I I would I would be surprised if a lot of teachers do do that but because we are you know we do take it um seriously we do try and do our research before we talk about these things we tell the parents what we're going to say so the parents are very aware of what the children are going to come home and hear so um I really don't want people to go away with this sense of horror stories in primary school because it really isn't my experience and I don't think it's experienced in a lot of schools primary schools in this country the only other thing I wanted to say is the one of the biggest problems we face is we've now become a One-Stop shop all the institutions around primary schools are crumbling Social Services all of these sorts of things so what then happens is there is a problem in primary school we try and Outsource it to the right people um and there's nobody there so then we try to deal with it I just had a comment to make to Milly about she mentioned the disembodiment of you know children these days and I would wholeheartedly agree if all of us think back to our own childhoods how much free time we had outside and that we were much less supervised and I just on a side note I used to wonder at the absolute Fascination that kids aged between five and let's say 10 had with stuff like this slime and that's just getting your hands dirty that's something that you can you don't actually need real dirt you can just actually have slime it's a poor substitute in my opinion but and the other thing with the fidget Spinners as well it's also like the kids are desperate to get their hands on stuff and do stuff and actually you know and I think that even the fact that kids don't even write as much anymore it's much more a screen kind of keyboard they're not developing the the fine motor skills and then the question of censorship and you know I I don't think it's appropriate to go oh my gosh with censorship that's not free speech we can't allow you know we miss our Free Speech no it's simply you're judging by you've got it you need to have your set of standards and if your standards uh if you consider that it's again it's an anti-save it's against you know Common Sense safeguarding to have such books in an educational um setting then of course you know feel you know absolutely get them removed from the the school I mean that's not Banning a book but I suppose it is but it's it's not in a sense of you know you're not contradicting any free speech thing because you're actually applying a set of standards as it going to cause harm you know yes it potentially will I saw some of the things on Twitter that they were talking about in these schools that were taking being taken out of or they were trying to get taken out of circulation and it was you know cartoon drawings of a young woman who was extremely uncomfortable with her body and what had was you know if you were someone that was considering being a you know a trans identity you know if you're on the path to be trans identifying no doubt you would identify with it but it wouldn't necessarily put you on a path to helping yourself you know in a healthy way and then I was interested if um the panel could talk about the fact that there is I mean I know that you say that there's not much um happening in primary schools but isn't everything that's happening in the states ends up over here so I'm just wondering as to whether that's actually where we're headed um and is it possible to opt out of the um the sex education that's offered at primary and intermediate is that actually legally possible you know I I just feel a sense of Despair and sadness and actually appalled at some of the stories which I think is about children's materials and I'd just like to think that there are going to be some head teachings Senior Management teams soon they're prepared to be very unpopular with parents of children coming into schools saying I do believe that such a thing as too much information too young because we've muscled in on children's childhood immune system the Carefree nature of it and I feel very sad for children great discussion um I love that point you made about some slime and being such a big Trend and I think that's really you know I've observed that as well because obviously as a as a art psychotherapist I did a lot of play therapy with children and one of the things that you do through that kind of sensory play is you go right back because that's there's a there's a model in drama therapy called embodiment projection role an embodiment is the first type of play that you do then projection like oh this these two little horses are clipping along and then roll I'm on the horse and I'm Galloping down the garden so that's a developmental um way of looking at it and that slime play is that kind of early sensory development um where you're you know you're looking you're you're in your body completely so the more that we could encourage children to do that kind of thing the better and there may be there's a reason why they're doing it um that they they feel they need it and so they're getting the Slime from the toy shop because we're not putting them in the garden with the mud or whatever you know so I think that there are these wider questions about how children are you know what children are being given to do with their time um and and and how play um is be is is sidelined as oh that's not what school's for school is for you know maths and English and I think there's a little bit out of balance there and just coming to your point I don't want to at all criticize schools or teachers and I just wanted to say about the um you know the points made about teaching about menstruation and you know period perhaps children being given the idea that periods are a bit icky I didn't for a second mean that a teacher is standing up in front of the class and saying that literally what I mean is it's an unconscious thing that we all have and that's the point I was trying to make is that we need to think about our own how to use the but a nice buzzword unconscious bias you know in regards to sex the female body um you know can we say the word vulva do we know the difference between a vulgar and a vagina um what's our own personal experience of periods if we're teaching about childbirth what kind of how were we born have we had babies what was it like do we are we carrying trauma I'm not saying that someone's going to actually come into a classroom and say you're going to talk about prayers today they're really disgusting and we're just going to move through it as fast as we can but there might be something underneath the surface for that person that is that's there whether they realize it or not so I think I just wanted to be clear that I was not in any way criticizing teachers who are doing an amazing job in these imagine I mean I wouldn't want to be doing it I wouldn't want the job um of sex education or you know at this point in in our human history because I think it's become incredibly complicated and like people have pointed out that's why it's being farmed out to external agencies because we all of us feel very de-skilled um and to come to you what you said we need to be we need to remember that we are actually we do know we're the adults I think that'll be my summary we are the adults we're in charge we know what we're talking about and we need to stay in that role and remind ourselves of that as the adults I don't think we should be frightened by these subjects and they seem huge and um perhaps insurmountable and particularly the online porn that children are looking at and I think I mean I know some very skills and good sex education teachers in schools I do think it's subject that needs to be taken seriously and what you need with these subjects to demythologize them and recognize that actually the skills that we need are the skills that generally teachers have and parents have generally but um we don't get too heavy about them we talk about them in Fairly matter of fact ways online porn for example is communicating messages just as everything else online is communicating messages so to integrate that subject into looking at online culture what messages the children receiving and teaching them fairly matter-of-factly to be critical consumers you know it and and the same with gender identity ideology well that's an interesting subject it's an interesting belief that people have to be able to discuss that without fear that's very difficult that particular subject is very difficult at the moment because you know a lot of teachers would not dare to for fear of losing their jobs that issue is so contentious um but actually to actually de-fraighten ourselves as adults and say is this a subject that can be discussed like any other subject and keep it at that level what you don't want is to I mean these are subjects this is like you can't put this back into the bottle either porn or or gender identity ideology because it's being seen and learned about online but what you can do is by by your role modeling demonstrate a way of approaching it that's fairly much for a fact that's not frightened by it that's not too heavy about it that is that would Empower children to be able to look at those messages they're receiving and make decisions about what they think about them rather than being controlled by them I mean I do think that um I don't want the parents in this room to go away thinking oh my gosh you know what's happening to my to my child um so that is the message that I want to give at the end and you know we do we teach um Internet safety in Primary School from a very very young age we teach them to be critical to Consumers obviously the subject to trans and LGBT you know is a really hard subject that's not even resolved outside of school so you know bringing it into schools is very problematic obviously we do um early years reception and early years are taught through play the children are playing all the time they're outside all the time schools have Forest schools um children go to the woods they do build bends they have mud kitchens so they are getting down and dirty and the play does continue we try and teach in a playful way sometimes but sometimes actually they just got to learn and you know our job is to give them the Summoner to learn someone said something about writing during lockdown the children lost their stamina for Learning and you know I am now making them sit there and I'm right and sometimes that is the right thing to do um for children um as I discovered in lockdown because I was very angry that children was were sent home and I was really worried because I was the only person who was in my school um and I just pushed it I thought I've had enough and I pushed an open door and I think sometimes you know as you were saying sometimes you've got to stand up and be brave and um push it that open door because people are very uncomfortable once these things start to creep in and I think parents and teachers need to stand their ground my final thing is sometimes it's best to do nothing my sister's a head teacher and she was telling me a little boy came to school wearing a dress and no one said anything and we're addressed the next day and no one said anything back in his trousers sometimes it's best just to go okay whatever you want to do that that's fine and it's not a problem actually the American Library Association um which is the big professional association for librarians sneakily changed their Library Bill of Rights a few years ago to say that they were opposed to uh discrimination against Library users on the basis of age now I have been a free speech Advocate uh all my adult life um and I I think I think that there is one situation in which censorship is appropriate and that is with children um and you know and and part of the reasons why we oppose censorship for adults is that it infantilizes them um and I think it's very important for us to police the boundaries between adulthood and childhood and you know I the one argument that I've had that I have a bit of sympathy with is I actually think that books are not a bad way for kids to begin to learn about sex um because you know it's something that they have control of they can look in they can you know get get out of the book if they if they feel uncomfortable but there's a difference between you know looking at your parents sex books and having it as a one impossibility as a school assignment um and so I I really think it's it's incredibly inappropriate to have these books in schools if you look at them they're about identity the ark for you for the ark is that you know I go through all this stuff and then I achieve my trans identity um and I I just I just think that that's not something that that we should be encouraging um and then the other thing I wanted to say about that is that parents who object are being I'm being tired as bigots and uh you know and there have been fake lists of books going around that you know they wanna they wanna ban To Kill a Mockingbird um and you know the people who want a band To Kill a Mockingbird now are woke people um and so I think we've just got to stop demonizing parents and listening to them and I think that particularly there is this this assumption well ho ho ho you know you can't leave it to the parents but yeah you know we have parents and Educators have to work together to decide this question that The Woman in Red asked you know what is appropriate what is the bottom line that um that uh of what we believe that children need to know and we need to come up with that together and finally just on periods um uh I am old enough that when I got my period I was delighted um and it didn't last but um but the reason why I was delighted was that I was really excited to be a woman um and I think that somehow we have allowed ourselves to to have this negative view of Womanhood you know that we're you know we're we're put upon it's no it's not it is absolutely fantastic to be a woman and I think if we stand up for that a lot of these problems will take care of themselves foreign [Music]

Channel: worldwrite

Views: 1,926

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Id: xMm4lJN37KY

Length: 71min 47sec (4307 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 11 2023