Source: Women are Human
UK — England. The start of the school term was due to see the introduction of a new relationships and sex education (RSE) curriculum in British schools – but it is already mired in controversy over the inclusion of a dice game about intimate sexual acts, designed to be used with children as young as 13.
The government-funded teaching resource includes a game where children roll a dice featuring body parts such as ‘penis’, ‘anus’, and ‘hand and fingers’, and are then encouraged to discuss the potential sexual acts carried out between them.
There has been an outcry over the game, produced by the Manchester-based LGBT+ charity the Proud Trust, particularly from women pointing out that the game centres a very male experience of sex and grooms children for male sexual gratification.
Note the there is no option on the dice to discuss the clitoris or breasts – female pleasure is not even a consideration. We are merely a collection of holes in which to insert ‘objects’”Cheryl on the Facebook Page Women’s Voices Matter
The dice game is one of four one-hour lessons in the Sexuality aGender teaching resource, which begins with an introduction to gender identity theory, including a word search puzzle to find the words, such as cis, intersex, genderfluid. In it’s second lesson, “The Sexual Body”, trainees are urged to “make no assumptions, especially about which types of people have which types of body parts”. A list of body parts provided inaccurately confuses ‘vagina’ and ‘vulva’.
And as campaign group Transgender Trend points out in its investigation into activities of the Proud Trust: “Worse is the drawing showing a partially stitched vulva, the stitching over the clitoris area, the result of female genital mutilation. This is not a ‘body part’ but the result of a crime, based on misogyny.”
The third lesson in the resource, “What Is Your Normal?”, includes among the activities listed: “Having anal sex”, “Receiving a gift from someone in exchange for sex” and “Watching pornography”.
The Proud Trust received £99,960 for Sexuality aGender from the government’s Tampon Tax Fund, which allocates money from VAT receipts on women’s sanitary products to projects that benefit disadvantaged women and girls.
Tanya Carter, a spokeswoman for Safe Schools Alliance, told The Times: “This ‘resource’ clearly breaches safeguarding. The tampon tax should be used to educate girls on their rights — not prematurely sexualise them.”
The ideas promulgated by Sexuality aGender are particularly harmful to girls and women. The growing pressure on them to agree to anal sex, its normalisation via pornography and some magazines such as Teen Vogue, and the physical harms that can result are all well documented. Without the language to talk about sexual inequality, sexism and male violence, girls will be left unable to make informed decisions about consent, harms and boundaries.Transgender Trend
On the Proud Trust website, the toolkit is outlined as ‘a fun, interactive, engaging and inclusive sexual health toolkit’ that helps secondary schools to deliver LGBT+ inclusive RSE and that it helps meet the needs of all students.
The MP for Thurrock, Jackie Doyle-Price, said RSE in schools should empower girls to take greater control over their bodies. “It is with horror that I see materials being produced which do the exact opposite. Schools should be teaching about mutual respect and consent and safe sex.”
The toolkit is one of several similar worksheets made by charities for schools that they can use to help to meet their statutory requirements. Conservative peer Baroness Nicholson of Winterbourne has written to Education Secretary Gavin Williamson saying that it is unsafe to abdicate responsibility for RSE to outside groups.
She wrote: “Abdicating responsibility to teachers only for them to abdicate it to minority interest lobby groups is surely unsatisfactory, unhealthy and unsafe. It is right for the state to ensure that certain bases are covered. Unfortunately, as offered, the guidelines leave the door open for anyone to teach whatever they want at any age they consider appropriate.”
