Sexual and Relationship Education in Great Britain

‘Sexual and Relationship Education in Great Britain:

Problems and Opportunities for Faith Schools with Special Reference to the Roman Catholic Context’

Dr Anna Abram, Heythrop College, University of London

Introduction

‘Sexual and Relationship Education’ (known as SRE) is a graduated, age appropriate programme which aims to teach British children and young adults about sex, sexuality, emotions, relationships and sexual health. All schools, whether they are public, state, private, faith or secular, teach it as part of Personal, Social, Health and Economic (PSHE) education[1]. The topics that SRE covers usually include: the importance of marriage and stable relationships in human life; how to avoid teenage pregnancy; how to recognise and avoid abuse and exploitation; skills to avoid being pressured into unwanted or unprotected sex; the benefits of delaying sexual activity and the importance of safe sex. Those who are involved in formulating the SRE curriculum as well as those who teach it stress that although SRE includes the teaching of sex, sexuality and sexual health, SRE does not promote sexual activity or any particular sexual orientation[2]. At present attending SRE classes is not compulsory - parents have a right to withdraw their children from the classes. However, this right will be altered due to a new bill that has been passed through British Parliament; from 2011 Personal, Social, Health and Economic (which includes SRE) education will become a statutory part of the National Curriculum. Faith schools, although ‘within the tenets of their faith’ will have to teach the new curriculum. Parents will have a right to withdraw younger children from the classes, but from the age of fifteen SRE becomes compulsory.

This article aims to present a general analysis of sex education in Great Britain in the context of this recent change. It intends to offer a wider reflection on the social and moral attitudes towards sex and sexuality that are prevalent in British society. It hopes to explore current issues that school educators are facing and examine a sample of reactions from religious and other bodies regarding parliamentary decision to make SRE classes compulsory. A case of SRE policy adopted by a particular Roman Catholic school will be presented as an example of a mature way of bridging the Catholic ethos of the school as well as pastoral concerns for the well-being of pupils with the demands of the National Curriculum. A moral theological reflection on the discussed theme will close this paper.

1. Reactions to the new governmental ruling on Sexual and Relationship Education (SRE) in British schools.

The governmental ruling that made Personal, Social, Health and Economic education (which includes SRE) a statutory part of the National Curriculum has, overall, received positive reactions from the British educators. Nevertheless some caution has been voiced by certain religious groups and representatives[3]. A big task that faith schools in Britain will have to face surrounds the issue of the conduct of the SRE classes. SRE educators are concerned about how to respond sensitively, in the best pastoral manner, to the needs of young people who are living in a society in which marriage is undermined and often blamed for a broken society, in which there are major shifts in attitudes towards sex and sexuality, and, in which there are signs of considerable disrespect of one’s own as well as others’ sexuality. There are, of course, many good signs of responsible and empowering approaches to sex and sexuality. However, this article is primarily concentrating on what is problematic and challenging for British educators. What follows is a sample of reactions, both positive and negative, to the new governmental ruling.

The Catholic Education Service for England and Wales (CESEW)[4] - which was very influential in making an important amendment regarding the freedom of faith schools to teach SRE within their ethos - issued the following response: ‘The CESEW believes that Personal, Social, Health and Economic education (PSHE) is vital in the education of young people. It enables factual information from reliable sources to be communicated and misinformation from peers or street culture or exploitation to be avoided. The CESEW also recognises that Sex and Relationships Education (SRE) is rightly a sensitive issue. We continue to wholeheartedly support the belief that parents are the first educators of their children, as well as recognising the significant roles and responsibilities of governing bodies on these issues’[5]. The CESEW unambiguously expressed its position on parental rights and clearly articulated its commitment to the teachings of the Catholic Church: ‘CESEW will continue to firmly uphold the position that parental rights remain vital, particularly but not exclusively, in those most formative and critical years up until the age of 15. As age and growing independence brings young people ever closer to pressures, advertising and coercion to behaviour which can undermine the healthy life of young people, we are comforted in the knowledge that our schools and colleges will do an exceptional job in providing Sex and Relationships Education, set within the teachings of the Catholic Church’.[6]

Jewish education leaders also gave a guarded welcome to the new ruling. A Jewish cross-communal group under the guidance of the Board of Deputies has been in talks with the government and other faith groups, including Catholics, Anglicans and Muslims, discussing sex education policies [7].

A positive welcome has been noted from gay communities, especially since in the National Curriculum there is a reference to homosexuality and civil partnerships. Joseph Galliano from The Guardian daily newspaper expressed the following view: ‘As a gay child, and in common with many gay children, I was terrified for most of my school life. If I did receive any sex education that seemed relevant, though appalling to me, it came in the form of an almost annual scandal – the suspension and expulsion of a couple of boys unfortunate enough to be caught in some forbidden clinch. We were either invisible or bullied by our peers and those in authority, denied information about ourselves and denied the right for our sexuality to be just one of the many things that made us who we were. Of course, this was almost 25 years ago for me and many positive changes have swept through society since then. We have an equal age of consent, anti-hate crime laws and more positive role models. I am deeply heartened that the government has finally done the decent thing and attempted to make proper sex education available to all schoolchildren and that this will now include information about homosexuality and civil partnerships[8].

There has been some criticism of the change to parents’ right to withdraw their children from SRE lessons. The Catholic Herald – a weekly catholic newspaper - published some misleading information on 29 January 2009 about SRE and undermined the good work of many catholic teachers and education services. Another critical response came from SPUC Pro-Life (Society for the Protection of Unborn Children). Paul Tully, SPUC’s general secretary, said: ‘We condemn this exploitation of the state-controlled school system by the government to deliver its anti-life policies to children, by-passing parental involvement. The government is removing the right of parents to protect their children from the explicit promotion of abortion and sexual health interventions in the latter stages. This will be exploited to pressure more schools to deliver government-style sexual health interventions. In recent years, these have been characterised by obscene and lurid presentations. These are the classroom equivalent of 'advertorials', promoting sex and birth-control products. They send the message to children: 'do whatever you like - just be sure to avoid or abort any pregnancy'[9].

The above reactions especially the ones that express a polarity of views (Joseph Galliano from the Guardian and Paul Tully from SPUC Pro-Life) suggest that even though there is a broad welcome to the new ruling, when it comes to specific points, opinions within British society differ. This difference is to a large extent related to the changes in how we view relationships. It seems clear that in Britain (as perhaps generally in the West) patterns of intimate relationships are changing. In Britain one can observe a variety of intimate human relationships: good and bad marriages, civil partnerships (some of which are said to be stronger than marriages), unmarried couples and single parents. People, generally, especially young people, are more afraid of commitment than they have been in the past; they take more time before committing themselves to life long marriages and often (not always) pay greater attention to the meaning of their commitment. Some psychologists point out that people don’t put up with misery as previous generations did when marriages badly break. A growing number of children, in the course of their growing up, are brought up by parents who have several sexual/life partners. Many parents abuse or disrespect their own sexuality. In such a scenario, one may ask ‘why do adults expect the children to be different?’. Children often follow behaviours of their parents and other adults who are close to them. The key challenge for educators is to be attentive to the overall moral environment in which children grow. From a Christian point of view, the challenge is to approach the situation with a good deal of compassion, understanding and not condemnation when making appropriate judgments and offering necessary guidance. The appropriate reading of the situation involves identifying the roots of what we see as problems. It is only then that we can make constructive judgments and sensitively consider ways of addressing the problems.

2. Attitudes to sex and sexuality: key problems

There seem to be three key problems in contemporary British society which educators, sociologists, pastoral ministers, moral philosophers and theologians seem to identify. These problems are probably not simply ‘British’ - it is very likely that they exist in other Western societies.

First, there is a blatant abuse of human sexuality. Let us look at the phenomenon of pornography. Previously (twenty, thirty years ago) pornography was an interest of some (mainly men). This interest was not easy to follow; there was a degree of embarrassment related to buying and openly viewing certain types of ‘men’s’ magazines. These days pornography is much more a main stream activity. It is no longer limited to ‘naughty’ pictures in magazines. It is now live, easily downloadable through PCs and mobile phones. What in the past was considered pornographic now is considered erotic and the boundaries are constantly changing. We see this movement of boundaries in the windows of our shops. A survey carried out in 2006 found that one in four men aged 25-49 had viewed hardcore online pornography in the previous month and that nearly 40% of men had viewed pornographic websites in the previous year. But, it is the prevalence of pornography consumption among children that is most striking. In a study in 2000, 25% of British children aged 10-17 had seen unwanted online pornography in the form of pop-ups or spam. By 2005 the figure was 34% — and 42% of children aged 10-17 had seen pornography, whether wanted or unwanted. In another study in Canada, 90% of boys aged 13 and 14 and 70% of girls the same age had viewed pornography. Most of this porn use had been over the internet. More than one-third of the boys reported viewing pornographic DVDs or videos “too many times to count”[10]. Porn industry is enormous: porn Hollywood is bigger than mainstream Hollywood. What is more worrying is that the Western issue of pornography is becoming a global issue and has a destructive effect on the rest of the world. Exposure to porn films produced in North America and Western Europe has substantially increased the rate of rape in Africa. The issue of rape in Africa is a taboo; it is not a crime as it is considered in the West; the majority of cases of rape in Africa remain unreported and unprosecuted; the voice of the victims is unheard and the suffering is constantly increasing. African men demand that their women behave like European/American women that they watch in films. When we look at these data and reflect on the British and, more broadly, Western abuses of sexuality we have to accept that this is a part (not the whole, of course) of the moral environment in which British children grow and learn to be adults. In this environment we are bound to feel anxious regarding formulating sex education policies so that what we design and teach could really speak to young people. Educators have to be attentive to this wider social scenario in which facts as the ones presented above regarding pornography speak for themselves. Herein lies a significant challenge to faith schools.

Secondly, another significant issue in Great Britain is the problem of teenage pregnancies. The current rate is 41.9 per 1,000 pregnancies. It is the highest rate in Western Europe. So far this decade has witnessed a 12 per cent rise in the number of abortions performed on under sixteen years old girls[11]. The general and politically generated opinion is that the teenage pregnancy is linked to social deprivation. It has often been the case, however, the as Madaleine Bunting from the Guardian newspaper[12] points out, Hackney, one of London's most deprived boroughs, has seen a drop of 25% in its teen pregnancy rate; Blackburn, also with high levels of deprivation, has seen a comparable improvement’ . It seems that there is compelling evidence that it is possible to bring down teen pregnancy. Well-designed services and sex and relationship education can make a difference. This is something that faith schools are invited to address in a constructive and direct way.

The third problem or set of problems is more general than the previous two (abuses of sexuality as exemplified by pornography and teenage pregnancies); it is more subtle; it can be referred to as ‘hyper-sexualisation of society’. Sex, which was previously a reserved topic, is now much more mainstream. It is more socially acceptable to talk about sex in a rather explicit way. Adults are both victims and perpetrators of the phenomenon of hyper-sexualisation. Children and young adults (often designated as ‘Generation Web’) are not immune from taking part in this kind of sexually-charged conversations and exchanges; the only difference is that much of their so called ‘sexual interactions’ are taking place via virtual networks. Some educators are concerned and wonder how the high proportion of our society that functions primarily on sensations generated by virtual reality (and less by human physical exchanges) will be able to form lasting loving relationships. South Korea (the most wired country in the world) is already struggling with this issue. Children as old as five have signs of virtual addiction and inability to relate ‘normally’ to their peers. In the UK many young girls (it makes no difference whether they come from faith or other schools) find their key identity in sexual appeal and behaviour. Natasha Walters (a feminist scholar and writer) in her recent book Living Dolls[13] paints a frightening picture of young women’s aspirations: an increasing number of girls seem to aspire to be pole- or lap-dancers or topless models. She criticises the ‘pornified culture’ for pushing young women towards these, increasingly considered as ‘legitimate’, careers. The hyper-sexualisation of girls is reflected in other, much more subtle, spheres of life. For example, ordinary high street clothes shops respond to the needs of nine years old girls (or needs of their mothers) by selling padded bras so that these very young girls can look ‘sexy’. Many mothers don’t protest when their daughters request such a piece of underwear or sometimes they even encourage their purchase. Walters makes a point when she says that feminism failed[14]. She suggests that feminism in Britain, in the end, didn’t liberate women. Another negative aspect of hyper-sexualisation, according to educators and health workers, is the age of children who are sexually active, which is constantly getting lower. It is said that there is a growing number of twelve and thirteen year old girls who are sexually active. Health worker suggest that there is a strong link between early sexual activity and depression.

At the risk of over-generalisation, the above reflection leads us to recognize that there are serious shifts taking place in how we, in Britain, approach sex and sexuality. The current situation has a profound effect on the self-understanding of the society as a whole as well as individual self-understanding; it has an effect on the aspirations of young women and on the shaping of characters of young men. Both sexes are being reduced to something limited. There are serious abuses of sexuality. Sex seems to be rarely viewed, as it is in the Christian (and in other religious) teaching, as a gift. Why are we failing as a society to understand sex as a gift? Could we say that our too paternalistic attitudes towards sexuality, even within our own Christian thinking, our ways of moralizing, our past negative attitudes towards it, have contributed to the current misuses of sexuality? What is clear is that this narrow view of sexuality is reductionist to all humanity. How is it possible to change this view? Our commercial world, the advertising and images we see around our cities are charged with sexuality. They are aimed to create sensations in us so that we purchase the products they represent. We ask ourselves in Britain what can we, as religious educators, do in this context, given that in our own Catholic culture we have significant failures and abuses of sexuality (including recent sex abuse scandals which have an impact on our society as a whole). It seems to me that we, first, have to acknowledge our negative attitudes towards sex and sexuality which we have had for centuries. Secondly, we need to transform these attitudes into something more positive. In the Holy Scripture, as Bernard Hoose points out, ‘one searches in vain through the books of both Testaments to find any real echo of the pessimism regarding sex and sexuality which is found in the writings of so many of the (Church) Fathers. Instead we find great praise of the heterosexual union, most notably perhaps in the Song of Songs’[15]. One of the main tasks that sex and relationship educators in faith schools in Britain have to undertake is finding ways of approaching sexuality in a more positive manner and present it as a God-given gift that needs to be cherished, enjoyed and not abused. Other tasks amount to addressing the following questions: ‘How might we attend to the concrete problems (which we identified above) with compassion, humility and not moralizing?’; ‘How is it possible to make the current situation an educational opportunity and not simply an excuse for condemnation?’; ‘How might we formulate Sexual and Relationship Education (SRE) policies so that they are meaningful, and realistic, able to meet young people where they are and not where educational authorities think they should be?’; ‘How can we help young people not to give in to peer, media and advertising pressures?’; ‘How may we talk constructively about the beauty of intimacy, sexual vulnerability, self-worth, and self-acceptance?’ These and similar questions are already being asked by a number of religious educators. What follows is an example of SRE policy adopted by one of the Roman Catholic schools for girls in London. This policy suggests that the school authorities and authors of the policy have not ignored the above questions but embraced them well; not strayed away from controversial issues but confronted them.