How abstinence-only messages infiltrated thousands of schools like mine – and set sex education back decades

Using the analogy of a piece of tape losing its stickiness on your hand to show how each sexual partner causes a loss of emotional connection is not sex education.

Yet this was the approach of an organisation who recently gave a talk to students in Year 9 at my school. And the name of that talk? “Save sex for marriage”.

I found it hard enough to believe that such backwards ideas were being freely spread in a non-religious environment, but when I found out how widespread the rollout was, I was shocked further; they had given this talk to 157,750 teenagers, according to their website. I naively thought that abstinence-only sex education was pretty much obsolete in the UK, reserved only for a few deeply religious, closed off schools.

Indeed, like others, I thought that the recent news of the South Carolina lawsuit regarding the banning of LGBT+ inclusive education seemed like a distant dystopia. With the US having a more religious climate than the UK, we tend not to be surprised at news stories such as these.

However, because of government legislation, the fundamental problems which the lawsuit tackled – a blatant lack of inclusivity and misinformation – can be found in a UK classroom. Section 34 of the Children and Social Work Act 2017 states that there is “flexibility for schools in their approach” when it comes to sex education. While new and improved statutory guidance will be put in place from September 2020, after hearing about the deeply misinformed sex education that my school received only recently, I worry about whether this continued emphasis on “flexibility” will really just be used as another excuse to continue teaching outdated ideas.

It’s worrying because such a message is more than just old-fashioned – it’s moralising and damaging. Teaching teenagers that having sex before marriage will doom them to a life of rampant STDs and emotional dysfunction is not sex education. It’s fear mongering, pure and simple. I found it unsurprising that many of the individuals who received the talk at my school found it “judgementaL.” Fortunately, the school counteracted this with other, more open discussions, but I imagine many schools would not do the same. Legally, they don’t have to.

Let’s face it – teenagers are going to have sex whether it’s thought to be a good idea or not. In a time when more and more adolescents are learning about sex through pornography, it’s vital that schools provide an accurate and sensitive approach to sex education. What we need is a Personal, Social, Health and Economic (PSHE) curriculum that makes providing unbiased information and advice about sex and healthy relationships compulsory, whether the school is religious in character or not. In a society that still stigmatises women for their sexuality and perceives heterosexuality as the default, there must be more explicit guidelines on what can and should be taught.

Outdated dogma, such as the concept that saving sex for marriage is the only “right” way to live does not correlate with research that specifically outlines that abstinence-only education is ineffective. Not only does this misguided approach alienate teenagers during a time when they need comprehensive advice, but it also undermines the sexual health services we have in place for young people in the UK.

We laugh at the characters on Netflix’s show Sex Education due to how inaccurate some of their beliefs about sex and relationships are. However, their concerns echo real ones that British teens are dealing with, problems that would never arise if sex education was detailed, relevant and all-encompassing. As long as an organisation with an ethos of “save sex” can freely give talks to students up and down the country without, at the very least, a counter-narrative, this will never change.

New statutory guidance indicates that progress is being made in this field. However, legislation should be far more than just “guidance.” Schools should not be allowed to present damaging ideas about sexuality or avoid talking about LGBT+ issues in the depth that they deserve. It’s this flexibility that is enabling an inconsistent and prejudiced approach to sex education in schools which is, in turn, raising teenagers that are much more misinformed than we would like to think.

Roya Shahidi is a year 13 student and an aspiring writer