Why is sex negativity still informing England’s approach to RSHE?

Lisa Hallgarten, Brook’s Head of Policy and Public Affairs, explains why we need to be concerned about more than just arbitrary age-ratings in the new draft Relationships, Sex and Health Education (RSHE) guidance. 

Organisations across safeguarding, health and education have condemned the draft, revised RSHE guidance as not fit for purpose. Key concerns are the age-ratings it introduces into the curriculum and the ban on talking about gender identity which we have touched on in this brief response to the guidance.  

What seems to be threaded through every aspect of the document is fear and negativity, not just about the many real risks and challenges that children and young people face, but about sex and sexuality itself. Unlike some Northern European countries which have for many years introduced sex education early and focused on normalising human sexuality, England has always taken a risk-focused, sex-negative approach.  

Progress in sex education has only ever happened in response to a public health crisis: the HIV crisis, the teenage pregnancy crisis, the STI crisis, the crisis of sexual harassment and sexual violence – which drove the move to mandatory RSE in 2017. Nobody has ever won the argument for more or better sex education on the premise that sex and sexuality are a normal healthy part of the human experience, that we should talk about, understand and celebrate.

This partly reflects our broader, frankly puerile, culture around sex in which sex is still considered a bit dirty, naughty, embarrassing or funny.  

It also reflects a political culture in which politicians of all parties aim to mollify the most socially or religiously conservative crowd every time sex education is on the agenda, even though these represent minority views; even though this might result in laws and policies that contradict all the evidence and undermine public health. 

The 2019 guidance on RSHE made no reference to sexual pleasure, so we certainly weren’t expecting the new draft guidance – written in response to a fabricated moral panic – to be any more progressive. But there is something shocking about guidance that introduces blunt bans on discussing sexual activity in such a way that it’s not even possible to talk early enough, or transparently or effectively about sexual health risks. 

Clumsy and counter-productive age-ratings aside, what is the problem with the sex-negativity in the guidance? 

We know that children and young people are being exposed to explicit sexual images through pornography.

They live and breathe in a society where sex is used to titillate, to amuse, to sell and to engage.

We have a choice as educators, as parents and as a society: we can leave children alone with the images of – sometimes – coercive, violent sex, performed by people selected for their porn-ready bodies and the unrealistic, peremptory, male-pleasure-centric sex of film and TV; or we can provide them with an alternative narrative of sex as consensual, sensual, mutually pleasurable, intimate, trusting, bonding and potentially life-enhancing. 

Talking about pleasure is a key part of supporting our young people to experience safe, healthy, satisfying romantic and sexual relationships as they transition through adolescence and into adulthood. This is as simple as acknowledging the way in which both male and female bodies are perfectly designed to experience sexual pleasure, and the importance of sex being mutual, kind, and shaped by good communication. With the easy availability of porn, the phenomenon of nude-sharing, sextortion, sexual exploitation and abuse it’s more vital than ever that young people can aspire to something better: nurturing a positive understanding of the ethics and characteristics of good, consensual sex alongside vital evidence-based sexual health information. 

Of course these are conversations that come with evolving age and understanding, but there isn’t a magic moment when we start them. They can only happen in year 7,8,9,10 – little and often with growing detail and complexity – because of what we learned in Key Stage 1: to name our body parts and to know which parts are considered private; that we have sovereignty over our own bodies, who touches them and how; who we can talk to if someone touches us inappropriately; how our bodies are brilliant and amazing even though they are all different and unique in shape, size, colour; how a loving family cares for us, whatever it looks like. We can only talk safer sex in Key Stage 3 because in Key Stage 2 we learned about human reproduction and puberty and that puberty comes with new sensations and feelings, physical,  emotional and sexual, that are normal and healthy and are preparing us to become adults. 

It was probably too much to hope that these kinds of common-sense ideas – that you would find in a Danish or a Dutch classroom – would make their way into sex education guidance in England, but this draft guidance is actually sprinting rapidly in the other direction.

We are being told that we should wait as long as we possibly can to talk about sex as if it is, in and of itself, poisonous and harmful.

It feels like it has drawn heavily on the US far right religious playbook that sees marriage between a man and woman as the only legitimate relationship, and sex as primarily- even solely – a tool for reproduction.  

What next? Abstinence-only education?