saw someone say "an 11-year-old isn't even supposed to know what sex is and if you do something horrible must be happening to you and you need to get out of there" like can we be for real for a moment. have some people honest to god never heard 11-year-olds making sex jokes in their life
and let's be honest. if something bad was happening, good sex ed would help them recognize that. trying to shelter children from even knowing what sex is doesn't help or even work, it actually enables abuse. teach them about consent
Hot take: let's not discuss sexual stuff around CHILDREN.
Let's not sexualize children or even think of children & sexual stuff
Don't discuss sexual stuff with CHILDREN.
They cannot consent.
Children cannot consent and I dont know how many times we have to tell you this.
CHILDREN. CANNOT. CONSENT.
people like you are the reason so many kids can't speak up about being sexually abused. go back to the catholic church or whatever. we need proper sex education and this is dire
oh they're literally catholic. that explains a lot.
sex education ≠ sexualization
sex education ≠ sexual abuse
sex education ≠ child endangerment
HOWEVER
sex education = increased safety through knowledge
sex education = decrease in teen pregnancy
sex education = decrease in spread of sexually transmitted diseases
sex education = productive and necessary
Hello! Literally practicing Catholic here! Raised by Catholic parents since birth! I went through things exactly like this as a child entirely because my parents neglected my sex education due to viewing it as 'scarring' and 'inappropriate'! Please fucking educate your kids about sex and what constitutes sexual abuse! Teach them they have a right to refuse! :)
And let's also say the uncomfortable part out loud here: it's not only about protecting kids against older teens and against adults.
The average age for puberty to start is 11-12, but it is normal for puberty to begin between the ages of 8 and 14. Puberty is only considered 'too early' by doctors and delayed with puberty blockers if a girl is 7 or a boy is 8. And while not everyone experiences sexual arousal in the first years of puberty, quite a lot of kids do.
So, as deeply uncomfortable as it makes adults: some 11 year olds have already been getting horny for 3 or 4 years. And while their first explorations of that feeling often happen alone, some of that hornyness will drive those kids to seek out others to experiment.
So without information, that 11 year old may end up having sex with another kid and may get pregnant. That 11 year old may sexually assault a younger kid, not out of malice but out of simply not knowing that you should not do this to others. The idea that these things will not happen if we don't tell kids about sex is patently false.
I know we don't like to think about literal kids getting horny, but if we ignore the fact that this happens, those will kids suffer because of our cowardly unwillingness to face the facts and to give them the information to stay safe and to be safe to others.
For those who want a source on the age at which people can start getting horny:
The sexual response cycle consists of desire, arousal, orgasm and resolution. People experience the cycle differently.
HOOOOOO boyyyyyy.
Okay. I'm trained in this.
You need to be providing age-appropriate sexual education to children from as young as you possibly can.
When kids are really young this looks like "Yes, that's mummy's vagina. Please leave the bathroom because it is rude to be in the bathroom while mummy is using the toilet. Mummy is placing her boundary, sweetheart, and you need to respect that."
"Yes, daddy does have something different to mummy. What daddy has is called a penis. Yes (mummy/daddy's penis/vagina) is the same as you."
You will notice here that I use the anatomical terms for these body parts. That is for a reason. It helps your child if something does happen better be able to disclose, exactly, what has happened to them. You do not want your child trying to disclose using words such as "secret pocket" or "hidden flower" or "willie" as this can obfuscate meaning. Imagine, if you will, Maisie trying to disclose that Coach Asshole touched her sexually by saying "Coach Asshole stuck his stick into my secret pocket," to a teacher or family friend who does not know that those words are euphemisms. Maisie has tried to disclose, but has been unsuccessful because she does not have the language that she needs.
Now, next.
Children, especially girls, can start going through puberty young. Like, really young. I have taught 9 year olds who menstruate. We need to be teaching these children about their bodies. We need to be teaching boys about the bodies of people who menstruate. There is so much misinfomation amongst grown cismen about menstruation because they are not taught it in school.
We also need to teach children about consent and bodily autonomy from as young as possible. This sets them up that even if they do, unfortunately, suffer abuse of this form they are vocal in their protestations and are more likely to disclose than children who have been taught to accept that adults can do whatever they want to a child's body. Granny kissing little Maisie on the cheek doesn't look that different to Coach Asshole calling his girls at gymnastics "Special girls" and kissing/touching them inappropriately, especially to a child (who, usually, have a much less refined emotional radar and both will cause them to shut down and just accept what is happening. You want your kid to be able to say "No, what you are doing/did to my body is wrong.")
So.
How should adults behave around children?
Firstly - my golden rule of interacting with children is If you have nothing to hide, don't hide anything.
This means when you are interacting with children you always do so in an area where you will easily be visible if another adult happens to walk by. No closed doors, try to minimise rooms without windows, have another adult present.
The reason you are doing this is to make it flag as strange and unusual to a child if an adult tries to get them alone. Safe adults do not do that. By making sure you are transparent in your behaviour, the child is more likely to flag something being wrong when someone is not transparent. You are equipping the child with skills to protect themselves.
They will also be more likely to disclose to another adult that an adult was trying to get them alone.
Secondly - No secrets.
(There is a little bit of an exception to this rule but to begin with, no secrets.)
This leads back to transparency. A safe adult will not ask a child to keep a secret from another adult. If Uncle Jeff is telling Nancy to keep "our little secret" when he gives her extra dessert, then Nancy is prone to believe that keeping a secret from another adult is something she's supposed to do when Uncle Scumbucket asks her to keep his inappropriate fondling of her as "our little secret." Children who see secrets as unusual are more likely to disclose that an adult told them to keep something a secret.
This is also important as grooming usually starts as "we need to keep you getting this special treat as our little secret." Uncle Jeff giving Nancy more icecream out of the goodness of his heart looks a lot like Uncle Scumbucket giving Nancy candy and lollies and extra screentime in an effort to get her to like him and Uncle Scumbucket's secrets are going to move on to "Sit on my lap today, honey, but don't tell your mother. Remember, this is our little secret." And eventually to Uncle Scumbucket asking Nancy to keep sexual activities as "our little secret."
You do not want children thinking that safe adults keep secrets.
Thirdly - this ties in a little with secondly but Teach your child the difference between a safe secret and an unsafe secret.
If you are unsure of the difference yourself -
A safe secret:
Does not hurt anybody by the keeping of it, including yourself.
Is usually accompanied by a feeling of excitement
Has an end date where everyone will become aware of the contents of the secret.
A safe secret is a surprise birthday party, a camping trip, a surprise trip to disneyworld, pizza!
An unsafe secret:
Can hurt someone and can hurt to keep
Is accompanied by a feeling of nervousness or dread or shame
does not have an end date. The secret is ongoing.
You can see how Uncle Scumbucket's secret is unsafe, but also how Uncle Jeff's secret is unsafe because Uncle Jeff's secret does not have an end date. Uncle Jeff's secret is unsafe because it is priming Macy to see Uncle Scumbucket's secret as reasonable, which leads back to the grooming discussed above.
Lastly, and this is very important -
'Protecting' children from having access to sexual education actually does them an injustice.
We do not live in a perfect world.
Bad things can and do happen to children, with depressing frequency. Get me drunk sometime and I'll tell you what I'm legally allowed to disclose of the stories where terrible shit has happened to children I have cared for.
Pretending that they don't happen means that if they do happen, children are unable to recognise and respond appropriately. You are making your child less equipped to protect themselves, not more.
Children who are taught age-appropriate sexual education from a young age are so much less likely to be in a situation of sexual violence than those who are not taught age-appropriate sexual education. Children who are taught age-appropriate sexual education are more likely to disclose if something does happen to them, than children who are not.
Protect your kids.
And for God's sake teach them the words 'penis' and 'vagina/vulva'
Also the idea that 11 year olds aren’t gonna want to figure out how the hell babies happen is absurd. And leads to little girls thinking they’re pregnant because they got cooties from a boy kissing her or some shit.
I learned the basics of sex Ed from a book specifically for elementary schoolers. It was fine. I wasn’t scarred. I thought it was hilarious. And you know what I did? I went and told every kid on the block.
Teach your kids age appropriate information so some little shit like me circa 1990 doesn’t make a REAL interesting school bus ride and a lot of awkward phone calls for everyone.
Even if a kid isn't being sexually abused, not giving sex ed to a pubescent kid doesn't give you a protected child, it gives you a vulnerable and easily abused adult in seven years' time. Because the main reason kids are considered unable to consent to sex is a power dynamic/autonomy thing but the second main reason is because they're considered to be still learning about themselves and about sexuality and need time to learn without the risk of being hurt. If you don't let them learn, they don't have the knowledge they need to protect themselves later.
I'm deliberately reblogging from this point in the reblog chain to leave off an idiotic comment saying (in so many words) "maybe if we stop calling it sex and call it a less stigmatized word the conservative christofascists will chill out and stop trying to get rid of science based courses that contradict their religious propaganda."
Respectability is a trap.
The best trick the devil ever pulled was convincing leftists that that we could earn fundamental human rights if only we tone policed ourselves hard enough.
"The problem is the word sex is so stigmatized!" "The problem is the word feminism is so stigmatized!" "The problem is the word queer is so stigmatized!"Cowardice is the problem, actually. Stop trying to comply in advance.
Additionally, while preventing and stopping sexual abuse is obviously an important reason to teach children sex ed from a young age, another fundamental reason is that genitals are simply a part of their bodies and sexuality is simply a part of life as humans, even for non sexually active humans.
no amount of control over your children will completely seal them away from having a body and from the culture that surrounds them, including its sexual sides. if you don't teach your 4yo what a vagina is, they're still going to have a vagina. if you pretend sex doesn't exist, they're still going to see that racy movie poster around the city and overhear that woman at the restaurant make a sex joke and see that funny video online their classmate found.
when you do not teach children about genitals and sex you have not succeeded at keeping children away from sex. I was a teacher -- i promise they still know and still have questions! and having them know without safe channels to ask and learn about it makes it way more likely that they will form their own distorted ideas of what sex is and absorb the sex shaming culture around us.
even without the threat of sexual abuse, education still creates the antibodies we need against the sex shaming and misogynistic parts of our culture that will otherwise work against our physical and mental health and promote alienation from our bodies and emotions.
luckily we now have a wealth of scientific research proving the benefits of teaching sex ed since early age.
but as a matter of principle, sex education is their right because sexuality will always affect children regardless of how hard some adults tell themselves it doesn't, and children deserve to know about things that affect them.
Rebagelling to highlight a phrase a few people have used now, as a middle-school (age 8-15ish in my district) who has had MANY conversations with parents about this in the past. ESPECIALLY parents whose first language is not English and who are not necessarily interpreting the "official language" around Sex Ed the same way a native English speaker is, which is... a LOT of the parents in my area.
AGE APPROPRIATE. There are SO many of our parents who just don't understand what sex ed IS or how it works, because they come from a time or place where it WAS very stigmatized, and the ability to calmly explain that no, you are NOT in any way going to be talking about how to have sex (younger years), you are talking about basic body part names and things like 'you will start growing hair in new and fun places!' has ended so many of these discussions quickly and calmly because the parents just DON'T KNOW, and now they do and it's ok.
The more we can teach parents what the actual meaning of AGE APPROPRIATE SEX ED is, the better off we will all be.
