A couple of days ago on Instagram, teenage girls started sharing their experiences of sexual harassment at school. The call to action is asking for schools to place sexual consent education at the forefront of educational issues in schools from a young age. I wholeheartedly agree with them - consent education needs to be included, and can be included in an age-appropriate way - from the first years of school onwards. (My belief is that teachers have enough on their plate, and we need social workers trained in these topics visiting every school to deliver these programs).
BUT, as parents, we can't expect schools to take on this type of education by themselves. We need to take ownership of the topic at home. We need to lead the way. We are the ones raising our children, and we need to step outside of our comfort zones and step up to the plate.
The truth is, most kids can tell you what consent means when you ask them in a classroom. It's their exposure to explicit content across many platforms that is undermining that intellectual understanding. Even if they can explain the idea of consent, their neural pathways are constructed to look for something very different in real life. Tik Tok, Snapchat, and the endless lists of readily available porn sites mean that our kids are viewing wildly inappropriate content at alarming rates, at younger and younger ages, and it is shaping their sexual development.
It's resulting in ingrained, subconscious beliefs that we never intended for them. This includes (but isn't limited to), the idea that when girls say NO - they really mean YES. It's treating girls as objects available for pleasure anytime, and it's setting girls AND boys up to believe that violence is an expected, normal part of any sexual encounter.
This may be challenging listening, but I can't apologise for that. It's an uncomfortable topic. We can no longer leave our teenagers to manage this on their own.
There ARE things we can do to turn this around for them.
Let's talk about teaching our kids consent from the very beginning.
For more support on teaching kids consent from the start, make sure you're following me at @saferstrongerkids on FB and @saferstronger on Instagram.
