NCed to say that parts of the sexual health and education charities world are not as clued up about safeguarding as I expected.
A few years back I had a close friend who was a very experienced (10 years plus) sexual health educator at a respectable medium sized sexual health charity with government contracts, work in schools etc. I went to one of her sessions for university students, and was shocked by what happened. She began a discussion with all of us young adults about our experiences of childhood masturbation and said that any hang ups we had about sex began when we were not able to discuss masturbation openly with our parents years ago when we began masturbating.
My own mother had told me, aged 13 or 14, that masturbation was healthy and normal, so when my friend started down this line of thought, I assumed that was the sort of parental support my friend was saying we should all have received. But then my friend claimed that young children ought to be confident describing the details of their masturbatory practices to parents and teachers (‘I like to masturbate by…’) and that children should talk to family and other adults about the details of their orgasms (‘I had a great orgasm this morning mum’). One person in the group challenged my friend about this, but she humiliated him for being a prude. There was no mention of child safeguarding or of appropriate boundaries between children and adults.
I don’t know if my former friend said the same things when she went into schools - presumably not, since she was invited back, though she often complained about how ‘conservative’ schools were. This session was talking to young adults about our memories of our childhoods. But her philosophy was that silence about any aspect of sex enabled abuse, that detailed discussion of sex was always beneficial, including between adults and children, and that emphasis on pleasure was the best way to prevent abuse and assault. I had no reason to think my friend had any inappropriate interest in children - she didn’t have much interest in them of any kind to my knowledge, and preferred working with adults. I knew many other staff at the charity, and so far as I could tell, they all had the same philosophy and the same approach to education. I had the impression that my ex-friend’s worldview represented the corporate view of the charity she worked for, though I don’t know if her colleagues shared her specific views on children talking to adults about masturbation.
I didn’t know who to complain to or what to do, and I wasn’t confident at that time in describing about what was wrong with what I had heard. This charity were the experts, so far as I knew. This wasn’t long ago though and I suspect that there are many such charities with a similar philosophy that goes unchallenged, regardless of the safeguarding implications.
I haven’t heard much comment on the Family Sex Show from the sexual health charities sector, and the School of Sexuality Education don’t seem to have disavowed the show, even though their own expertise is only with KS3+, and this show is aimed at young children. Basically I’m wondering whether there are quite a few people in this field who don’t understand safeguarding as they ought to, potentially enabling those with a nefarious agenda to operate in plain sight.
Maybe the government needs to look at toughening up safeguarding training for anyone offering any sexual health education to children in school or out of it? My understanding is that at the moment there’s actually no requirement for organisations offering SRE guest sessions in youth clubs, community centres or even schools to have done any safeguarding training, but hopefully a teacher can correct me.