From the article
"There is no turning back the clock on adolescent sexual behaviour"

I'm sorry, but this is a joke. As it is part of her conclusion, I would have to say that her whole philosophy underlying the point of her article is wrong.

As if you cannot improve the level of self-control that adolescents have. What bigotry.

As a person who has previously taught sex education, and who currently works with children and yp, i agree with Anne's comments. I also agree that the family is the ideal starting point for such education, but the reality is that many parents, for a variety of reasons, are reluctant to discuss the facts, feelings, decision-making processes and their values related to sex. It might also be worthwhile clarifying that comprehensive sex education should discuss moral decision-making and assist yp to generate their own moral position, as well as helping them to identify unsafe sexual situations, and the impact of peer and societal pressure, and not just the mechanics of sex. When i was doing this work it was patently obvious that some YP were getting excellent and well-rounded information at home, and others were completely clueless. This is the benefit of sex ed in schools - it captures those YP who are getting incorrect information or none at all. I also believe that it could be beneficial to teach YP how to critically analyse and filter the information they recieve from the media and other sources as a way of countering the confusing messages about sex. This could be done either as a component of sex ed or more generally.
In relation to the declining age of first intercourse, there are some obvious concerns about why this occurring, but maybe it is worth remembering that it is only quite recently (the last 100 years or so) that the age went up, also in response to a change in societal values. YP have always had sex. What is important is that they do it safely, when they are ready and according to their own moral compass.

Becla
You have said that sex education should occur in the family, and I agree, but families are not in very good shape in our society. This you would probably know already as a teacher, as you would likely see the affects on children. I know of a teacher who routinely takes breakfast to school, so she can feed breakfast to the children in the class.

Studies would show that there are some family types where the children are more likely to do better than children from other family types.

This is now a relevant point. Education systems and social scientists want to have a standardised, but optimum sex education system, but these same people have been very quite about those families that are not optimum by any means, and those families more often have children that are overly promiscuous, lack self-esteem, take drugs more frequently, do poorly in school work etc.

I can remember reading about the situation in the US, where it was estimated that for every $1,000 spent trying to fix social problems resulting from decimated families, only $1 was spent on trying to strengthen families. Most of the money spent on the programs (ie programs to reduce child delinquency, programs to try halt teenage drug taking, programs to reduce teenage pregnancy, programs to reduce runaway children etc) were latter found to be ineffective, because what the children lacked the most was parents and a stable family.

I think Australia will be following the same pattern, a state run education program for this, another for that, a mentoring system for this, another for that, but it is all artificial, expensive, and not greatly effective anyway.

So overall, I think that many of these state run social education programs could be just a repetition of what is occurring in the U

It seems that the average age for starting to have sex has gone down since sex education and sexual liberation in the 1960s.

Does anyone have any hard statistics which shows this and if so won't more sex education lower the age even more.

Children may be physically able to drive when they are 12 (just visit a farm) but are we going to start driver education at 12 years of age as well

t.u.s.

In Victorian England the age of consent for girls was 13. Books by the likes of Cyril Pearl or any number of credible historians of that era recount the prevalence of prostitution and paedophilia combined with an ignorance about sex and sexuality.

The Victorian era was, of course, a time when learning about sex was confined to the "better classes". The ignorant masses weren't supposed to know. But that wasn't exactly good for society.

I think there's a lot of misconceptions when it comes to sex and the age of consent throughout history. I'll try not to make my understanding too long winded....

For most of European history people lived in villages. Travel was long, dangerous and due to internal passports, legally difficult. The vast majority of people were subsistence farmers which meant the vast majority of people only traveled within say, a 50-100km radius their entire lives.

There was no such thing as social mobility. If your father was a farmer then you would be a farmer, your father a farrer, you a farrer etc. There was no universal education, only some church schools and individual tutors for children of the rich. You didn't need them anyway. Society changed at a glacial pace. You're father or mother would be able to predict pretty much exactly how your entire life would proceed. In all probability it would be cut short by pestilence or famine anyway.

In the context of this society you were an adult at the age of 14 or 15. This meant sex for 14 or 15y/o would have been completely acceptable.

Modern society is much more complex. It takes 12 years of education just to teach children how to function in society (and many more for some). Consequently childhood is getting longer and longer. Childhood itself was only 'invented' a couple of hundred years ago. Adolescence is a much newer invention probably only about 50 years old.

So to those people who talk about child abuse in the past: how could you abuse a child if childhood didn't exist? How could you call someone a child when they had already been earning their living for years, were as well educated as their parents and would rest in the certainty that their ‘station’ in life would not change?

Continues next post....