Improving Sex education to prevent sexual misconduct
Sexual misconduct starts with an education that shifts the norms we have about sex, relationships, and body.
As our culture and media have already sent millions of messages in the wrong direction. Adulthood is not the best time to start these conversations. They are making sex and sexuality the enemy in the least effective way. Research shows that the more we talk about sex in the late childhood and teen years, the less likely it is that abusive cases will arise. It’s our goal and responsibility to bring up the whole student.
Here are the top three guidelines for creating cultures of consent in our schools:
1. Education on Consent:
The consent is not as simple as it seems. We’ve all grown up in a culture that promotes harassment through movies, music, and advertisements. We’re fed to stories about unhealthy relationships that are presented as romantic, seductive, or humorous. All of these depictions feed into the concept we call rape culture and the beliefs that promote sexual violence.
This is far more than “no means no,” and even “yes means yes”. This concept does not cover all the dynamics involved in consent. For example, consider the concepts of token resistance (TR) and token compliance (TC). TR is the expectation of a no when the individual really wants to say yes—e.g., “good girls” are supposed to not like sex, and their no supposedly masks their genuine desires. TC is the flip side: a person saying yes under pressure when they’d rather say no. To educate on consent, we must address these points honestly.
School districts and educators can educate the students by bringing sex education experts to schools.
Having these discussions inhealth classes where sex and relationships are now examined is too restricting to even think about. In other words, we need to heal the inequalities that lead to sexual misconduct and wrongdoings. We have to prepare all educators on sexual misconducts, consent, dating problems, and reporting and response duty.
2. The concept of Sexual Agency:
Sexual agency is the capacity to declare sexual requirements, needs, and limits adequately. Sexual subjectivity is a person’s capacity to ponder their sexual needs, personality, and rights to pleasure. Together, these ideas structure the establishment for making societies of consent.
All change starts with empowering the person. We can assist students with forgetting wrong messages about sexual disgrace, victim blaming, and slut shaming, and show them self-perception, sexual empowerment, and their entitlement to sexual pleasure. Doing so can move the current worldview.
3. Spread Love and encourage healthy realtionships:
Part of creating a consent culture is exploring what defines a healthy relationship. Any time two or more people are interacting whether in friendship, flirting and dating, or long-term and marital relationships both empathy and consent must be present.
Conversations that assume that everyone is cisgender or heterosexual are not the answer, and neither are ones that paint every victim of the assault as female and every culprit as male. We must break away from these stereotypes and underrate these discussions. Every culture, ethnicity, and religion has a unique perspective and expectation for romance, love, and sex.
Therefore as soon as our children can understand language, we should start to educate them about this matter. The seeds of consent are planted in the way we show our children how to share, how to ask before touching or taking, and that every person has their own right to their body.
Our children need to know their right to assert their ability to say no and to require an authentic yes from even those in positions of power. But this cannot begin soon enough, because consent is about so much more than sex. It is about the human rights that we are gifted at birth. Indeed schools are in a uniquely important position to do this challenging.
