Community Conversation - If You Think Sex Education Is “Grooming,” You’re Part of the Problem
The following is part of DougCo Collective’s “Community Conversations” and was written by a Douglas County community member (parent, student, teacher/staff or community member). The intent of “Community Conversations” is to give members of the Douglas County community an opportunity to contribute to the larger DCSD conversation with their lived experiences and perspectives.
Estimated Read Time: 4 minutes
Sex education in schools is not “grooming” in any way, shape, or form. Here’s an example of what it actually does do, from right here in DCSD.
Towards the end of 7th grade, there was a unit on sex education and other related topics (online safety, using devices responsibly, drug and alcohol use, etc) in my daughter’s Integrated Health and Wellness class. I was aware of this, as her teacher had sent an email to all the parents ahead of time. I was glad that all these things were being discussed in class, because although numerous conversations about these things have happened at home, the conversations about them with teachers, peers, and the School Resource Officer are perhaps even more important.
The teacher and/or the SRO may also be aware of things that parents aren’t – social media trends, new apps, and so on. I mean come on, what was your first reaction to learning what TikTok was? Mine was, “Oh great – yet another app that I have to check out, research, and learn to use so I can monitor what my kid is doing on it.” And now there’s some new chat app called Discord that I have to learn about. Parents are often the last to know these things. It’s exhausting.
My daughter came home from school one day and told me that online safety and other related topics – specifically, all the reasons why texting naked selfies is always a bad idea and, for someone of middle school age, illegal – had been discussed in class that day with the teacher and SRO leading the conversation. One of her friends whispered to her that a boy in their grade had been asking girls to send him naked selfies. It wasn’t just one or two girls either – it was a significant number of the girls in 7th grade. Her friend – who was one of these girls – was too nervous to talk to their teacher and tell him about it.
I told my daughter that I needed to report this to her teacher so that he, the administrators, and the SRO could investigate and get to the bottom of it, and put a stop to it if it really was happening. She agreed, and I reached out to the teacher and asked him to call me. I told him what my daughter had relayed to me. I didn’t want to put the details into an email, because if it turned out to not be true, I didn’t want some poor kid to have his name floating around on the district’s email server accusing him of doing something so awful – or worse, for his name to be somehow made public, opening him and his family up to doxxing and harassment.
The more opportunities kids have to openly discuss these things with people other than just their parents, the more they’re going to learn about them. They’ll be much better equipped to recognize what might be a questionable or even dangerous situation, and they’ll know what to do about it. Study after study conducted in countries around the world have proven that sex education can help prevent teen pregnancy, sexually transmitted diseases, child sexual abuse, create safer spaces for LBGTQ students, and reduce relationship violence.
Making sex education a forbidden topic of discussion, or refusing to even acknowledge it at school and in the classroom sends kids the message that there’s something wrong with having open conversations about these things. It teaches them to keep secrets, and that there are some things that can never be talked about. That environment – one in which keeping secrets is normalized – is far likelier to make a child more susceptible to being groomed by a child predator, because that’s where people like that operate – in secret, in the shadows.
They say that “sunlight is the best disinfectant” and that is never more true than it is when it comes to this topic. I’m so thankful that my daughter attends a school where the teachers do not shy away from this, because when she learned that other girls at her school had been getting unwelcome overtures from a classmate, she knew exactly what to do. And part of the reason she knew was because in addition to the conversations with her parents, she learned about it at school. Because it had been discussed in class, she knew that reaching out to a teacher, either herself or through one of her parents, was the right – and safest – thing to do.
I’ll take sunlight over secrets any day of the week.