Anal sex for 13 year olds? Warwickshire again...

I honestly think the demi sexual stuff is the only way kids can find to say no to anything sexual without being bullied into it by their peers. "I just don't want to" doesn't seem to be a good enough reason any more.

Thanks for articulating that so well BarbaraStrozzi
Morals and ethics are part of sex, what we are seeing is a March to deny that, to strip it down to a mere physical act. If its merely physical only hysterical prudes would say no to any random encounter. You see it all the time in pro prostitution discussions - oh, they are well paid for just 30 mins of her time. Emotions and psychology are part of sex - it's even acknowledged in kink that it's about psychological states - but yet in another sense the psychological and emotional aspects are totally denied.
Of course, it's a reaction against excessive repression of earlier eras. But mad swings in any direction dont suit most people. Most people are, for want of a better word, ordinary. Until they get porn sick.

No wonder teens have to label themselves as demi sexual hetero romantics, when they just mean they want to sleep with people if the opposite sex who they both fancy and like. IE most people. No disrespect to GLB people here, I'm just talking about the most common 'orientation' given a grandiose name to - what? Validate themselves in the eyes of this cohort? Validate normal human emotions and sexuality? Claim the right to be affected emotionally by sex?. Weird its come to this.

Excellent post BarbaraStrozzi. It's such a complex area and you highlight the dilemmas for parents so clearly.
The more I think about this, the more convinced I am that the police should be taking a close look at the hard drives of people who write this stuff for children as it is evident they are very lacking in some significant boundaries.

I share your suspicions, Bernard. I think there are some very unsavoury adults piggy-backing on this.

However, as the mother of a child coming up to the teen years, I don't want to throw the whole discussion out.

What I personally am hoping for: keep communication open, explain to DS that he's quite likely to be shown this stuff on his mate's phones or (for all my internet filters etc.) stumble upon it himself (either by accident, or through curiosity, or simply because most teens are very interested in sex - I used to look for the sex scenes in adult library books aged about 14 or so). But that quite a lot of this stuff will be downright nasty - painful, non-consensual (which makes it rape), deeply misogynistic, pushing utterly unreasonable expectations about both bodies and what sex should be like.

And (most importantly) that he has a choice. And that that choice is exercised in a moral context. That he can choose to look at the really nasty stuff, and it will do him no end of psychological damage. Or he can choose not to look at it. And, once he's old enough, look for sexual gratification elsewhere - somewhere where the emphasis is on mutual enjoyment, consent, respect for one's partner, giving one's partner pleasure as well as receiving it.

And I fully expect these conversations to be bloody excruciatingly embarrassing for both parties.

But I'm also aware that (a) I may fail (due to excruciating embarrassment, due to the fact that teens come more or less pre-programmed to ignore their parents on the big stuff) and (b) there are parents out there whose approach is ostrich head in the sand or religiously driven "abstinence only" (which simply doesn't work).

So there is a role for schools. The thing is, you can't discuss this stuff in a moral vacuum. Adults themselves will be somewhere on a spectrum from "look, some sexual acts are abnormal fetishes and probably best avoided, and some - the violent and/or non-consensual ones are flat out wrong" all the way through to the "your kink is not my kink but that's okay" anything goes brigade.

The trouble with the Warwickshire material was not covering this stuff, but that the agenda was so clearly driven by the "anything goes" brigade. Whether because they were just a bit dim but genuinely believed that (some idea that we'd all be happier people if we embraced eating shit for sexual kicks and got in touch with our inner furry), or because they were sleazy perverts actively trying to undermine children's sexual boundaries, I don't actually know.

But sex ed without reference to morality is never going to end well. Because sex is never a morally neutral activity (unlike, say, eating a nutritious meal). It always has an ethical dimension. That needn't be "wait until you're married then do it for procreation in a set of church-approved positions", but it has to, as a bare minimum, include consent, a willingness to aim for mutual pleasure, and a respect and liking for your partner as a fellow human being.

Its just wrong that they have erased the responsible role of the adult and claimed its right just because the children want it (if you can believe these are real questions).

Isn't it the whole point of being a responsible adult and parent to restrict harmful activities and engage age appropriately

Not to just say, oh and yeah, there's all this other stuff you can get up to aswell thats positive and normal!

DC need to know a lot more about a lot of other stuff before any 'need' to know about this. I didnt know, and I still don't want to.

I'm an adult with dc and I dont want to look at it because I dont want those images in my mind, why would I.

Horrible commentary that they are only reviewing because its what they should be doing, not a hint of concern. None. At. All.

What Monica (and I'm still waiting for her reply as to why she got Respect Yourself and All About Me, two different campaigns re the sexualisation of minors, mixed up following my very clear complaint about RY) and co also fail to mention is age of consent.

This was aimed at 13 plus. Promoting anal sex to children and telling girls to just take it, isn't just gross, it's illegal.

It's good to hear that the Times have now picked up on this although I don't think they have highlighted some of the most disgusting content. I would have also liked to have seen them investigate some of those dubious characters who wrote that stuff.

Full text from article:

The 1950s cabaret act Flanders and Swann had a routine that urged, “Ma’s out, Pa’s out, let’s talk rude”, climaxing in a line of playground swearing: “Pee, po, belly, bum, drawers.”
Innocent times. Not one of those words merits an entry in an explicit self-styled “sextionary” created by a local authority to explain sexual positions and body parts to 13-year-olds and older.
Starting with the number 69 and ending with zelophilia — a condition in which a person is turned on by jealousy — the guide sets out a sexual vocabulary for the modern teenager in blush-making detail.
Posted on a website called Respect Yourself, it was commissioned by Warwickshire county council and is being read by up to 30,000 people across Britain each month. The council suspended it last week and launched a review.
Twenty terms are listed for the act of sleeping together, accounting for just one paragraph of the 47-page guide. Among the fetishes that can be named in a family newspaper are amaurophilia — it involves blindfolds — and bagpipes (something unmentionable to do with armpits).
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The guide was criticised by the Christian Institute, whose deputy director, Simon Calvert, said: “Respect seems to be the last thing on the minds of the people responsible for this appalling material. Young people deserve to be treated with dignity, not spoken down to as if they have no self-control or moral compass. Compiling an A-to-Z that includes some of the most dangerous and degrading sexual practices imaginable and presenting them all to young people as equally valid and healthy is profoundly irresponsible.”
The guide offers practical advice while condoning promiscuity. “If you are on a girls’ holiday and make the decision to sleep with someone you’ve just met — for safety’s sake, take them back to your place, where you know your friends are only in the next room” is an example.
Monica Fogarty, chief executive of Warwickshire council, said the site, which has been live since 2010, stood by its explicit content, which had been generated by young people: “The rationale behind the language in the sextionary was that we wanted to work with the young people themselves. We promised them we would be really honest and print their questions as they came to us.
“Young people argued that knowing what the terms mean, however unsavoury, they feel safer, and would therefore not agree to being involved in anything they don’t understand or feel comfortable with.”
She said it had helped halve the teenage pregnancy rate in Warwickshire, while cases of sexually transmitted disease had reduced by a third. Even so, she said it was right to review it. “As a public body, it is responsible to do so.”
Last month her council was embroiled in another controversy when it emerged that a sex and relationships programme called All About Me was teaching children as young as six about touching or “stimulating” their own genitals. That area of the website is now under review.

in a tragic effort to be "down wiv da kids"

that's a charitable interpretation of the motivation of the people who facilitated this. it's probably true for most of them. but not all I don't think

you really need to think carefully about the motivation of people who want to educate children about sex

The sad thing is that teens are exposed to porn and do need help learning how to navigate this. But a website which (in a tragic effort to be "down wiv da kids") just says "Here's explanations of some really out-there practices" without any context, criticism, discussion, assessment of health risks - such a website is clearly not helpful.

It would be good and useful to tackle hard core porn use among teens from a media studies point of view?

Who's producing this stuff? Who's benefit are they making it for? Who gets the profits (and how big are they)? Are you in fact being played by big business here? Is everything "advertised" to us safe and healthy? Is "advertising" just what you see on telly/billboards, or do other channels such as social media, social media count too? What role does sexism play - are these healthy images of what women (and men) should be like? What's the ethics of "advertising" something addictive (smoking versus vaping, for e.g.)?

Also both those articles were from years ago but it sounds like the start of the rot behind the Warwickshire publications. Good job they've been taken down.

Amy Munahay or something was the manager of Respect at the time promoting all this.

Its also all accessible from an app it said

I just read that pp article link and found the one above, which says this

Jon Brown from the NSPCC told Channel 4 News that they thought it important to do this research to get an insight into young people’s views on sex.

“What we’re seeing is that there is a very regular and normal consumption of hardcore adult pornography – that the sharing of explicit sexual imagery by photos or by video clips is now extremely normal, so I think it’s important to recognise what was previous regarded as unusual, concerning, or sensationalist, now has in fact become the norm,” he said.

But then that we need to accept it is normal instead of unsuccessfully restricting access.

This can't be right??? Right?

www.channel4.com/news/lets-talk-about-sex-website-answers-teens-questions

i think this is the article

www.thetimes.co.uk/edition/news/council-suspends-explicit-teen-sex-guide-9p3xbkw3j

no share token, sorry

as for this

She said it had helped halve the teenage pregnancy rate in Warwickshire

as discussed upthread, the teenage pregnancy rate across the country dropped by 48% over the period the chief exec has previously referenced, while only dropping by 43% in warwickshire

so it would be possible to argue that this programme was in fact counter productive

and no mention of the 500% increase in sexual attacks on children by children in warwickshire while the programme was running I note

Article in today's Times (sorry, no link- on phone) saying Warwickshire have pulled this guide (together with details of some of the stuff described including "bagpiping - something questionable to do with armpits). Leads to the following comment BTL :

"She said it had helped halve the teenage pregnancy rate in Warwickshire," Hardly surprising if they are all doing the armpit thing instead.

Yes, 'safeguarding love? Don't be stupid, nowhere's safe!'

BlackAgain and don’t forget ‘Men will always rape women so no point trying to avoid it’

Would it just say, 'Yes, some people are pedos. Get over it'?

Does anyone have a link to a good “safeguarding for dummies” guide? I am thinking it might be useful to have one to hand.

however our friend Etty Martin who commissioned him needs to be thinking very carefully about why. someone whose sole qualification seems to be that he likes talking to children about sex is notnecessarilythe best candidate

I know. I mean...dur guys - that's like 'Safeguarding for Dummies' right?

And it's astonishing how often those people in authority need it dinning into their heads that our children need protecting from weirdos and you don't take people at face value when they want access to kids. Savile taught them nothing.

as far as i can see, he basically worked exclusively for warwickshire, hence no need to tout via linked in

however our friend Etty Martin who commissioned him needs to be thinking very carefully about why. someone whose sole qualification seems to be that he likes talking to children about sex is not necessarily the best candidate

while what Jonny produced was offensive, sexist, gaslighty crap, the main issue is with the people who paid him to do it

there are always weirdos who want to produce rubbish. people who have responsibility for public money should be capable enough to know how to avoid giving public money to those weirdos.

Maybe the council/s think that anyone in their 20s will do in terms of producing material aimed at teens and that's all the qualification they need.

Quite Orchid. It's probably a bit late for me to go a-digging as all info will have been pulled/protected but I'll give it a go.

Our first question as parents, grandparents etc to school heads who allow these 'consultants' in should be 'what are their qualifications for this role?' And then keep pushing. If we don't look after our children, who will?