Contemptuous creed of the zealots who dictate sex lessons
by Belinda Brown, The Conservative Woman:
This is the first in a series of three posts this week by researcher and writer Belinda Brown on why we should be very worried indeed about the Department for Education’s new compulsory Relationships and Sex Education (RSE) programme, as reported on yesterday’s TCW.
THE Government’s instruction to schools to roll out the controversial RSE programme from this September has been widely reported.
Much less known is that it is largely the brainchild of the Sex Education Forum, an organisation which emerged to counteract the ‘moral panic’ around sexuality and sexual orientation triggered by the AIDS epidemic.
The introduction of Section 28 in 1988 (which stated that a local authority shall not intentionally promote homosexuality or publish material with the intention of promoting homosexuality, or promote the teaching in any maintained school of the acceptability of homosexuality as a pretended family relationship, since repealed), garnered them further supporters.
The erroneous belief (see here) that sex education reduced sexually transmitted diseases and teenage pregnancies further amplified their voice.
The Sex Education Forum first secured funding from the Department for Education in 1990 and today is ‘hosted’ by the National Children’s Bureau. The DfE has pledged £6million to help train teachers in areas of the new RSE curriculum, but the SEF’s director, Lucy Emmerson, has called for £60million to be made available.
Parents have a wide range of beliefs about what their children need to know about sex, which is based on their knowledge of their child’s stage of development, their own experiences, the environments their children grow up in and their religious and ideological beliefs.
This shapes their ideas about how sex education should be approached with their child. With compulsory RSE, the Government decided to take their influence away. Its offer of consultation over it was a form of compensation. In reality, it is a totally inadequate sop.
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