Sexuality Education

Since last fall, I have been co-teaching a group of eighth- and ninth-graders in the curruculum of Our Whole Lives, which is a pretty remarkable sexuality education program.

This is not the sort of thing I had ever done before, but it is amazing and I recommend it wholeheartedly. Rather than teaching the simple mechanics of condom use, or the simplistic "no means no," it teaches things plenty of us adults would be wise to learn. For instance, how in relationships of all kinds, it is wise to learn how to be assertive, as opposed to passive or aggressive.

If everyone had that skill, we could eliminate 90% of the the world's troubles.

But I digress.

The news I really have today is this: in preparing for tomorrow's class on rape and sexual abuse, I learned a shocking thing: people who run programs for at-risk youth estimate that as many at 100% of the girls (and maybe even the same percentage of boys) are victims of sexual abuse. 75% of those were abused by someone they knew well.

To me, this gives a powerful new argument for a big effort to prevent sexual abuse. Consider that when "Uncle Charlie" or whoever slips into a little kid's room, he has more than one victim, because in many cases he is essentially ruining the life of the child. He is dramatically increasing the likelihood she will get in all sorts of trouble, and need the intervention of the state, the police, corrections facilities, counselors, the list goes on...

There are people in this world who decide priorities based entirely on dollars. Memo to them: Uncle Charlie is costing a lot of dollars.

You could almost make the argument that if the Uncle Charlies of the world could learn to control themselves, we might not need programs for at-risk youth anymore. And if we didn't have at-risk youth, who knows how much the prison population might fall. And if the prison population fell dramatically, who knows how many more families would be united and happy. And if more kids were raised in happy, healthy families, who knows how much less drug abuse there would be. And there were less drug abuse...

Sorry, I slipped off into liberal utopia for a second.

Anyway, I think it's fair to say that "Uncle Charlie" is to blame for A LOT, and it's no good turning a blind eye to it. I know, no one wants to call the cops on a family member. But the alternatives are devestating.