THE BIRDS, THE BEES & THE BIRTHING VIDEO
Following a Trouble Club evening with MAF’s very own sex & relationship therapist, Charlene Douglas, I was prompted to consider the importance of ‘getting it right’ when teaching the often delicate, and let’s face it, awkward, topic of Sex Education.
Do you remember your first Sex Ed lesson? If like me, you went to school in the days of overhead projectors, the following experience may ring a bell…Let’s set the scene. You are around 11 years old. You are sitting in a science lesson, breathing in the familiar scent of rubber combined with gas residue from the bunsen burners. The squeak wheels draws your attention to the fact that the TV is being wheeled out. ‘Yippee!’ You exclaim to yourself, or some such jubilant exclamation, for the appearance of the TV surely means that the next 20 minutes or so will be spent watching a vaguely educational video, as your teacher steals a valuable moment of peace. The VHS clunks into the video player and the old familiar white and black fuzzy lines fill the screen, before the title of the video appears there. But hang on…last lesson you were learning about pollination - this video’s title doesn’t seem related to that… or does it… The film opens with a SCREAM. The scream is being produced by a woman, who is clearly being tortured - surely this can’t be right! You glance back at your teacher, but she is sitting at her desk, unassumingly marking books, not seeming the least bit concerned by the desperate wails filling the room, which are continuing at an alarming volume. At a gasp from your neighbour, you turn your attention back to the screen. The wailing woman’s legs are opened wide. Blood. Blood everywhere. Then, darkness. You wake in the nurse’s office fifteen minutes later - your friend tells you gleefully that you had fainted clean off your chair. Who can blame you?
During this Trouble Club event, I was stunned to witness much of the audience raise their hands to attest that they, too, had been unwilling viewers of this cinematic masterpiece. One attendee even spoke about the boys in her class being taken out of the room, leaving only the girls wishing that they could gouge their own eyes out. As you may have been able to infer, the wailing woman in the video was not, in fact, being tortured, but giving birth. At the time, I think we were too consumed by the aftershock to consider the purpose of airing this premiere of birth to 11-year-olds. As an older, and potentially wiser, woman, the only rationale I can surmise was that our educators were hoping to frighten us half to death about sex, thus deterring any ‘funny business’ behind the football pitch. It certainly calls to mind the wise words of Mean Girls’ Coach Carr:
“Don't have sex, because you will get pregnant and die! Don't have sex in the missionary position, don't have sex standing up, just don't do it, ok, promise? OK, now everybody take some rubbers.”
Thankfully, things have changed since the 00s. Okay, we all miss the Spice Girls and not being readily available at any given moment (RIP, BRB), but Sex Education has come a long, long way. Since September 2020, Relationships Education has been compulsory for all pupils receiving primary education and Relationships and Sex Education (RSE) for all pupils receiving secondary education in England. However, it must be noted that parents have the right to withdraw their children from Sex Education, at any age. Each school has a unique approach to RSE - for example, although primary schools are not legally obligated to teach the ‘S’ of RSE (that’s sex to you), some do choose to teach the foundations of this - thankfully, the infamous birthing video seems to have fallen from favour. In addition to this, it is the responsibility of the school (teacher) to adapt their RSE lesson according to the various backgrounds of their pupils, which can present a mammoth challenge. Often, teachers are so frightened of ‘getting it right’ that they just avoid the topic entirely (imagine being faced with an angry mob of parents at the school gates…)
As a former teacher myself, I have many years of experience in teaching RSE. Awkward? Yes. Necessary? In my opinion, absolutely - however, some schools would beg to differ. At one time, I had begun teaching at a new school and was trying to understand what exactly I ought to be teaching my Year 6 class in RSE, as the Summer Term rolled around (for those non-teachers, summer term tends to feature lessons on all matters reproduction - for example, in science the children might learn about pollination or evolution, which naturally leads onto the subject of sex). Obviously, the prospect of teaching Sex Education to a bunch of giggling Year 6s did not fill me with glee, however, I felt it my duty to provide them with essential information. For example, I believe that teaching about consent at this age can be hugely impactful, before puberty fully hits and the ol’ brain doesn’t work as rationally as it used to. So, I asked every colleague I could get hold of - but adults can actually be pretty cagey about sex (fun fact for you), so it proved fairly difficult to get answers. In the end, I discovered that the whole thing was pretty ‘hushedy-hush,’ given the proportion of students from highly ‘traditional’ backgrounds - we were absolutely NOT to teach about sex, or even mention the names of genitals. I was filled with part-relief, part-disappointment. Although I was certainly happy to avoid the immense awkwardness, it did seem a shame to me that these pupils, who would clearly be exposed to the topic of sex, would miss out on this opportunity to ask questions and be set straight with the facts. Perhaps I am anomalous in this opinion, but I’d like to think not.
Children are curious by nature and with the internet at their fingertips, or if not theirs, their friends’, can we really delude ourselves into believing that they will not come across sex before secondary school? As Charlene rightly said, we need educators who are comfortable to teach this topic - perhaps it’s not fair to throw that onto the retiring Geography teacher, perhaps we need to consider bringing in experts, to ‘get it right’ when it comes to sex ed. After all, what’s the alternative - can we really rely upon Google searches, and therefore inevitably the porn industry, to educate our children about sex? Is this really our best alternative to the infamous birthing video? That frightens me almost enough to faint off my chair all over again.