Let’s talk about sex
DOORTJE Braeken has a cartoon she likes to show to conferences to encapsulate the stereotypes associated with her native Netherlands.
Clogs feature, as does the quaint little boat-shaped hat, but the girl in the image is also swigging Heineken, smoking a spliff and wearing a sleazily seductive smile. The message, convention suggests, is that the Dutch are far too liberal for their own good.
As with every stereotype, a little truth lies within but there’s also a lesser known fact about society in the Netherlands — it has one of the lowest teenage birth rates, lowest abortion rates and highest first-time sexual intercourse ages in the world. It also has a long, strong tradition of early sex education.
Doortje, senior adviser on young people with the International Planned Parenthood Federation, thinks Ireland has something to learn from her country’s approach.
“We are a very pragmatic people. We live under the sea so we build dykes. It means if there is a problem we have to do something about it,” she says. “If you are pragmatic, you know young people are sexually active and you accept it.
“In Holland we are not worried about whether they have sex but about when they have sex, that it’s consensual and they are happy and safe.”
Doortje was one of the speakers at the Irish Family Planning Association’s (IFPA) second annual Young Decision Makers Conference last Friday where teenagers and young people from youth groups around the country were invited to explore and debate issues involving young people and sex.
Niall Behan, chief executive of the IFPA, believes that too often public debate around the subject gets waylaid in shock stories about teenage pregnancy and drunken Junior Cert frolics. The subject, he believes, deserves a much calmer, broader discussion.
Statistics back up his views. For all the fear of teenage pregnancies, the numbers have stayed much the same for 30 years.
In 2005, there were 2,427 teenage births and more than 1,800 of those were to young women aged 18 or 19. More significant is the fact that 28% of all women who have had a pregnancy report having had one they describe as a crisis pregnancy and a quarter of those crisis pregnancies were terminated. It seems clear that the lessons that go unlearned early in life have consequences later on.
Figures for sexually transmitted infections (STIs) show a similar trend. While teenagers made up a worrying 11% of all notified STIs in 2005, young people aged 20 to 29 made up 63%.
Again, it suggests that young people are getting through their teens relatively unscathed but are not picking up the knowledge then that will equip them to safely enter the next phase of more intense sexual activity.
The statistics agree with less than half of 25-year-olds reporting they had any education on safe sex and STIs. Go up a generation and you enter the dark ages. Only one in eight of 40 to 44-year-olds say they were ever taught anything about safe sex or STIs. When you consider that these are the parents of today’s 15 18-year-olds, you can see how the problem perpetuates.
The IFPA has begun a programme called Speakeasy, which helps parents learn how to talk to their children about sex. “It’s aimed at parents who haven’t had good sex education themselves — and believe me there are plenty of them about,” says Niall Behan.
“Their response is: what I got wasn’t great and I hope it’s not like that for my children but what on earth do I say to them?”
The programme is only at pilot phase and limited to a couple of women’s groups in Limerick and Dublin. Funding for such initiatives is one of the key problems for voluntary groups like the IFPA.
“We need to improve access to these types of programmes but resources are always an issue,” says Niall.
One of the problems, he says, is the lack of a national sexual health strategy that would help drive, co-ordinate, implement and fund initiatives across all sectors of society from schools to community groups to health services.
Minister for Children and Youth Affairs Barry Andrews, who popped into the conference in an informal capacity to observe some of the activities, acknowledged that more could be done. “It’s not an absence of will. It’s a question of resources,” he said.
He praised the idea of the conference as a safe forum for young people to openly express their views and stressed his department’s own policy of listening to what they had to say.
He pointed out that a consultation with young people following the legal debacle over the C case on statutory rape had produced the finding that the majority wanted lenience in the law where sex between minors was consensual and the male partner was within two years of the age of the female.
“That view now forms part of our considerations,” he said of the continuing efforts at political level to find a solution to the legal uncertainties created by the case.
But on the specific question of formal sex education, he said it was not something he could claim responsibility for. That was a matter for the Department of Education.
Yet even in schools there is a haphazard approach to the subject of sex. Every secondary school is required to teach Relationships and Sexuality Education (RSE) but it’s up to the individual school to decide what the lessons should contain and how they are taught with the result that many schools get away with barely making reference to the subject.
On the day the conference took place, Britain was exploding in furious debate after two leading children’s charities there called for sex education from the age of four. Phone-in shows heard from horrified parents and school principals were turning pale.
“Ireland is not the only country that is nervous about sex education,” says Doortje who tuned into the debate before her address. “I was listening to some of the reaction and how people are panicking but what can be so bad about teaching a four-year-old how to name the parts of their body or how to relate to other people? It’s not about teaching them to have sex.”
Surprisingly, there is no compulsory curriculum in the Netherlands so schools can tailor their teachings to the needs of their own students and, if they wish, give consideration to religious views on the subject. Perhaps elsewhere, freedom to decide would lead to freedom to evade but that is not the case in Doortje’s country.
She doesn’t believe early and explicit sex education necessarily offends religious sensibilities. “Sex education should be about learning to treat other people with respect and dignity. That’s what religion is about too.
“We found in a study that children of the opposite sex in the UK are friends until they are about 10 and then they drift apart and when they come back together at age 15, they see each other not as friends but as sexual objects. Where is the respect and dignity in that?
“In another study, we found that in Sweden, young people say the right time to have sex is at 16 or 17 years — which is the average age for first time sex in Sweden. But in the US, they said the right time was 19 to 20 even though the actual age was 16 to 17. So they are doing something they are not ready for.
“If you are feeling that you are doing something that’s not right, it’s difficult to be open about it. If you put shame on yourself, you won’t talk about it. We can’t tell young people the right time to have sex but whenever they do it, we would like them to feel ready and happy about it. And if you don’t help young people decide for themselves when they can do it, you don’t help them at all.”
The lack of preparedness Doortje speaks of is echoed in the Irish experience. The IFPA found that of girls presenting for family planning services at age 17, the majority had had their first sexual encounter at 16, so already a year had passed before they’d felt able to look for advice.
Doortje also questions the kind of language used in traditional sex education and whether it helps or hinders learning. “When educators talk about sex, we talk about responsibility and morality and health and hygiene.
“When the sex industry talk about it, they talk about pleasure and sensuality and fulfilment and fun. Who do you think young people are going to turn to? So we need to talk about sex as something positive or else young people won’t talk to us at all.”
Irish Family Planning Association: www.ifpa.ie
Crisis Pregnancy Agency: www.crisispregnancy.ie
www.SpunOut.ie : online youth magazine supported by various state and voluntary agencies including the IFPA with comprehensive section on sexual health
Health Service Executive: overview of services available by typing “sexual health services” into the search box on www.hse.ie
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