Our Desk | Education needs to be educated

Renato Marques

Various cases and claims of sexual abuse have been in the news over the last couple of months.

From the case involving a kindergarten and some of their staff members, to several cases reported by the police, and now recent statements from the Deputy Director of the Education and Youth Affairs Bureau (DSEJ) on homosexuality and pre-marital sex, one common theme arises – something really went wrong in our education.

If sexuality in general is seen as a “taboo” topic in many societies, we seem to be very far from progressing education and providing accurate information to younger generations on this very important topic.

It is a sensitive matter and it needs to be addressed with care and, above all, with intelligence.

To do so, in my opinion, we need to once and for all put aside a bunch of assumptions. The first one is that children are “ignorant.”

No, they are not ignorant, and, in fact, they probably have been researching such topics more often than those who are supposed to “teach them,” or in other words, help them fully understand.

Other assumptions that we need to address and put aside are those generated by “popular or religious beliefs.”

We should not teach our children about the details of sexuality and sexual relationships in terms of “sins,” but rather address the topic from the perspective of safety, in both personal terms as well as legal terms.

What children need to be aware of is how to protect themselves from unhealthy and unsafe relationships. By unhealthy, I do not mean only physically, but mentally too.

But worse than that, as I mentioned, we do not seem to be progressing in any way with this topic and we have people that are in positions of high responsibility stating things like: “Students do not have the capability to assess their own sexuality,” and that “young women should refrain from having sexual intercourse before marriage because their future husbands might not like it.”

This kind of speech, besides the “preaching” style, is definitely not what we want, just as we cannot decide the sexuality of our sons or daughters.

Instead, we should teach them about the problems they might encounter in unsafe or unlawful relationships, as most of the issues we have been hearing about in the last few months have happened in relationships that, in the eyes of the law, are unlawful even if consented to.

To clarify, the legal age in the region for consensual sexual relationships is 14 years old (not 16) and any relationship between people under 14 years old is considered unlawful, even if both parties consent and are underage.

The case gets even more serious if one of them is over the age of 14, in which they can be a defendant in the case, although the case would still be handled by the juvenile court.

In summary, I would just like to state the obvious. The great majority of these problems are happening with teenagers aged 13 years or below, proving that sexual matters must be addressed much earlier than that. To postpone sexual education until high school because of a perceived need to have “more maturity” to understand the topic as we have been doing in our schools does not solve any problems – in fact, it is contributing to the creation of the problem.