Al Jazeera opinion piece: Comprehensive sex ed is a human right

Agree?

http://nar.al/46s

To withhold critical, lifesaving medical information from young people is a violation of their human rights. Sexuality education should be mandatory, shame-free and medically accurate. No matter how much politicians, parents and educators wring their hands, adolescents will continue to have sex — and teaching them abstinence isn’t going to deter them from it. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 44 percent of female teenagers and 47 percent of male teenagers between the ages of 15–19 have had sex. If legislators keep chipping away at sex education programs, adolescents will not be equipped to make the best choices for themselves.

It’s essential to give children age-appropriate information about their sexual development. There are so many things I wish I had learned about sex when I was a girl: what bodily changes to expect, the mechanics of sex, STD prevention, masturbation. Instead, my sex education was full of shame and double standards. At school, some teachers judged the girls who became pregnant. I once asked an administrator why there weren’t any programs to educate students about safe sex, and he replied that it wasn’t the school’s place, that it should be taught at home. Meanwhile, at home, I was taught that sex outside of marriage was immoral.

Because I was desperate for information, I would press my ear against my radio at night to listen to the call-in show “Loveline.” Teenagers would dial in to ask bizarre sex questions. It’s how I learned about STDs. But life would have been much easier to navigate had I had been guided by thorough and sex-positive information. Simply having access to books would have helped. But where was a Mexican girl in a working-class neighborhood going to find a copy of that classic, evidence-based text on sex and sexuality, “Our Bodies, Ourselves”?

Though I’m no longer the 15-year-old girl afraid of her own desire, it’s a shame that it took so many years of work to cultivate a healthy understanding of sexuality. I often think of the confused, young people out there who crave information and understanding right now. Who is going to help them navigate so many irrational and damaging messages?