The National Forum   Donate   Your Account   On Line Opinion   Forum   Blogs   Polling   About   
The Forum - On Line Opinion's article discussion area



Syndicate
RSS/XML


RSS 2.0

Main Articles General

Sign In      Register

The Forum > Article Comments > When sex education is no better than child abuse > Comments

When sex education is no better than child abuse : Comments

By Alison Campbell Rate, published 7/3/2005

Alison Campbell Rate argues that there needs to be a change in emphasis with teenage sex education.

  1. Pages:
  2. Page 1
  3. 2
  4. 3
  5. 4
  6. 5
  7. All
I would like to congratulate the author on this article. I believe this article attempts to hide nothing, and makes known many of the issues regards sex education.

I personally can only highlight that I think that our society has become too awash with sex and violence in the media for it to be healthy. Sex and violence sells, and the media must begin to take responsibility for what they show.

It is no use saying that parents should monitor their children’s exposure to sex and violence in the media, because there is so much that it becomes impossible. More moderation is required by the media, and this includes magazines, TV, pictures, music, PC games, advertisements etc.

The other area of personal concern, becomes how much sex education is carried out in the schools and how much at home by the parents. I personally have found it very difficult to find out what the high schools are teaching the students with regards anything, and when it comes to matters such as sex education, then are they teaching something different to what I am trying to teach my child, or can my teaching be run in parallel with that of the schools. Very difficult, when you don’t now what the school is doing.
Posted by Timkins, Monday, 7 March 2005 1:27:13 PM
Find out more about this user Recommend this comment for deletion Return to top of page Return to Forum Main Page Copy comment URL to clipboard
Have any of the "brains?" behind sex education realised that it is possibly better to teach the parents first.(Sex education belongs in the home of nurturing loving parents). Then have these parents deeply involved in sex education at the school. YES I know with many uninterested parents it would be difficult. Yet many parents would attend with their children and all would learn.

I watched a sex educational lesson some time back and the teacher demonstrated how to fit a condom would you believe to a mixed class.

Now these sex "educators?" must have thought that the males in this class were complete,utter and total morons. Did they think that these dumb blokes would try to fit the condom over their noses or perhaps their heads? As for the girls were these sex "educators?" telling them that it was their responsibility to 'dress' their stupid partner as they - the girls - were the lesser creatures and had to take the role of minder. Or were /are these sex "educators/teachers?" a pack of dirty perverts getting their thrill or fix for the day? Or maybe they were just reinforcing the notion that single sex is great and if you wear these condoms you will have no problems even emmotional problems, and emmotional problems especially for the female are the bad ones. These pedophiles are letting our children down and, as said, they are absolutely stupid or dribbling ugly perverts and pedophiles of the worst type - LEGAL PEDOPHILES. Regards, numbat
Posted by numbat, Monday, 7 March 2005 1:37:01 PM
Find out more about this user Recommend this comment for deletion Return to top of page Return to Forum Main Page Copy comment URL to clipboard
As the author and the first respondent admit, today's society, especially the media in all its facets, is "awash with sex and violence", and any attempt to "nomalise abstinence" would involve "a seismic social shift." But while both use all the correct language, neither writer seems to appreciate the task being proposed. No concrete strategies are put forward, and in a way that is not surprising - the chances of any success in fundamentally changing media content, particularly in the short term, are laughably small.

Meanwhile, children are still growing up in this society, and what we need are realistic strategies for steering them through the perils of emerging sexuality. If abstinence training cannot be effective without a major social shift (and certainly statistics from the US indicate that recommendations of abstinence are far from effective), then surely we need to consider other options.

Rate's plea for better (and more) counselling services is a step in the right direction, but tying this to unrealistic dogma is a mistake for which today's children will pay the price
Posted by chris_b, Monday, 7 March 2005 1:42:03 PM
Find out more about this user Recommend this comment for deletion Return to top of page Return to Forum Main Page Copy comment URL to clipboard
Numbat, Chris_B

Numbat, I would agree that the parents are highly necessary for children’s sex education, but also study after study has now found a significant correlation between teenage pregnancy and the removal of fathers from families.

In the study shown at the posting, http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?article=3066#3317 the loss of the father from the daughter’s life can increase the chances of the daughter becoming pregnant by up to a factor of 8.

I know of no other factor like it, and the father’s general presence can have an enormous positive affect on the daughter. Attempts by organisations to carry out wide-scale removal of fathers from families and from their children to produce a fatherless society now seriously affect the female gender itself.

There are 1,000 divorces per week in this country, and more often than not, the father is removed from his children following that divorce. But counsellors or even sex education programs cannot replace fathers, and the more society ignores fathers and tries to remove them from families, the greater the negative affects become.

Chris_B, The amount of sex and violence in the media has definitely increased in time, and current TV programs would have been taken off the air due to public complaint if they were shown when TV first came out during the 1960’s. That would be a fact, and even the lyrics to popular songs are now almost pornographic.

However all is not lost (yet) and if the issue is considered as a health issue, then steps can be done to overcome it.

At present, media standards boards such as the APC and the ABA are highly centralised and quite often toothless tigers. If those boards were decentralised, such that media standards representatives were in employed in every main media company (IE similar to safety officers or environmental officers being employed in industrial companies), then there might be better localised control over media standards.

However having highly centralised, toothless tiger standards boards such as the ABA will probably mean that media standards just get worse over time.
Posted by Timkins, Monday, 7 March 2005 3:04:42 PM
Find out more about this user Recommend this comment for deletion Return to top of page Return to Forum Main Page Copy comment URL to clipboard
Sex education, like everything else, needs to be done properly and professionally taking into all aspects of sex and sexuality, thoroughly examining the issues and attempting to be as unbiased as possible.

Just as mathematics is taught in that teachers go through algebra, logarithms, arthmetic, geometry etc (hopefully without bias towards one area), the same principles should be appled to sex education. Sex education should be as uncontroversial as teaching maths.

Naturally this won't happen anytime soon. But it would be useful to take a more dispassionate view that we already apply to maths or science.
Posted by DavidJS, Monday, 7 March 2005 3:10:33 PM
Find out more about this user Recommend this comment for deletion Return to top of page Return to Forum Main Page Copy comment URL to clipboard
Thanks for this thought-provoking and down-to-earth piece.
Posted by ruby, Monday, 7 March 2005 3:12:27 PM
Find out more about this user Recommend this comment for deletion Return to top of page Return to Forum Main Page Copy comment URL to clipboard
  1. Pages:
  2. Page 1
  3. 2
  4. 3
  5. 4
  6. 5
  7. All

About Us :: Search :: Discuss :: Feedback :: Legals :: Privacy