Sex-education for four-year-olds
Children as young as four should be given compulsory sex education, say two sexual health charities. The Family Planning Association (FPA) and Brook claim this would cut abortion rates and sexually transmitted infections (STI) among teenagers and would help children not to rush into sex when they were older.
However, the suggestion has been criticised by the Family Education Trust whose director, Norman Wells, said, ‘There is no evidence at all to suggest that starting sex education at the age of four is going to reduce STI and abortion rates among teenagers.
‘We have had 30 years of sex education in secondary schools and it has never been more easy for teenagers to get hold of contraception without their parents knowing, yet both abortion rates and STI rates have continued to rise. It’s quite extraordinary that the FPA and Brook should be calling on the Government to impose something on every child in every school that has no proven benefit whatsoever…
‘Agencies such as the FPA and Brook have done a tremendous amount of damage by their failure to set sexual intimacy in a clear moral context. They are wedded to the view that children under the age of 16 are autonomous individuals who have a right to engage in sexual activity, and through their emphasis on so-called “safe sex”, they have reinforced the idea that having a series of sexual partners is the norm.
‘But sexual intimacy was never meant to be just about the joining of two bodies, but the joining of two lives. In the context of a faithful, lifelong marriage, it expresses the total self-giving of a husband and wife to each other.’
