There was definitely a sense, 19-year-old Andre Anderson said, that the sex education teachers at his secondary school “viewed us as ‘just kids’ and thought ‘they shouldn’t be doing it, so they don’t need to know.’ They tell you how a baby is made, but there were loads of teenage pregnancies around so we knew that. The media teaches you a lot about sex, but it’s like education tries to hide it from you.”
With experiences like this, it’s hardly surprising that a new study commissioned by Brook, the UK sexual advice service for young people, found nearly half of secondary-school pupils find their sex and relationship education (SRE) lacking, while just 6 percent of young people said they got the information about relationships they need from SRE lessons.
Shockingly, the study of more than 2,000 14-to-18-year-olds revealed that worrying myths still prevailed: 59 percent have heard that a woman can’t get pregnant if the man doesn’t ejaculate inside her, 33 percent have heard that you can’t get pregnant the first time you have sex and a quarter of young people have heard you can only catch HIV if you are gay. Meanwhile, one in four pupils get no SRE in school, and a quarter of those who do say they don’t think it is taught well.
Simon Blake, national director of Brook, isn’t surprised.
“We are told by the young people who access our services it is too little, too late, too biological,” he said. “And what they really want is emotions, real life dilemmas and much more about relationships.”
Is it a peculiarly British affliction to be so inept when it comes to talking about sex?
“We certainly do have a British approach to young people and this topic unfortunately does still get politicized, rather than it just being another area of learning,” Blake said.
You only have to look at the controversy whipped up by groups such as the Christian Institute, whose recent report Too Much, Too Young said that children were being shown “explicit” images in primary school sex education, or the Conservative Member of Parliament Nadine Dorries’ recent bill to teach abstinence in schools — but only for girls — to see what a battleground SRE can become. In the meantime, organizations such as Brook say, sex education is patchy and young people rely on their friends for information (while frighteningly, the study shows, 5 percent — about the same level who learn most from asking their parents — of it comes from Internet porn).
Brook’s research follows a study published last month that found a rise over the last two years in the number of 16-to-19-year-olds having unprotected sex with a new partner. In that survey, 19 percent of young women and 16 percent of young men said they had not received any kind of sex education in school. Last year, the Health Protection Agency reported record levels of the numbers of sexually transmitted infections (STI), with two thirds of the cases in young women.
Sophie Wilson, 17, remembers a couple of SRE lessons in primary school, then a couple during her first years in secondary school.
“Those were mostly about -different STIs and condoms, but there wasn’t a lot about what to do if you got an STI. There was nothing about different relationships like same-sex,” Wilson said.
It wasn’t until she was 17 that there was a lesson on how to get tested for an STI. It would be useful, she said, if lessons could cover wider issues, such as rape or abusive relationships, too.
Wilson said her SRE didn’t prepare her for adulthood.
Most of the information about sex she has got comes from “my friends, from general things that have happened to them. The Sex Education show [on Channel 4 on TV] was good because it was quite direct. I guess it’s just stuff I’ve heard around.”
The danger of that, she said, is that you don’t know how reliable it is.
“The other danger is people might think they should just get [sex] over with and see what happens and learn from experience,” she said.
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