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A letter published in The Church of
England Newspaper
21st March 2004,
The Editor,
Sir
In his article
‘Politicians miss the point’ (18th March), Lyndon
Bowring, the Chairman of CARE, claims that ‘many excellent resources
are increasingly used in schools promoting abstinence and presenting
marriage in a positive light. My organisation, CARE, has a new sex
education resource called “Evaluate”, and that is a good example of
the resources on offer.’
What does CARE
mean by excellent resources that promote abstinence? Perhaps this
question can be answered by taking a look a CARE’s sex education
video Make Love Last, partly funded by the Department of
Health, and bought by 45% of all secondary schools.
In vox pop
style the video employs speaking heads to advise young people about
sexual conduct. An agony aunt of Just 17, the highly
salacious teenage magazine, advises them to say no ‘if you don’t
want sex’. (The corollary, of course, is that if they do
want sex they should say yes.) A health education expert
informs the young viewer that everyone has the right to say ‘I don’t
want sex with you now’. The language in Make Love Last
is full of smutty sexual innuendoes and is replete with coarse,
slang references to sexual intercourse. A skit, ‘Find a Mate’,
shows a young man asking a young woman, ‘Will you go all the way
when I let you play with me?’ The prize is a dirty weekend in Paris,
staying at Bonking Motel.
The most
disturbing aspect of CARE’s video is that its message is
fundamentally amoral. It does not warn that sexual promiscuity is
wrong, it does not teach sexual purity, it laughs at modesty and it
ignores chastity. In other words, it demoralises sexual
conduct—young people are encouraged to do what they want, to make
‘informed’ choices about sex, free from moral restraint. Even more
disturbing is that the teachers’ guide mentions the SIECUS Bulletin
‘Values and Sexual Health Education’. Will CARE’s new initiative be
any better?
Yours sincerely
Dr ES Williams,
FFPHM. Edited version published in Church of England
Newspaper, 25 March 2004. |