Innocence and Sexualisation

The vigour with which some people are prepared to attack moves towards more open, honest and comprehensive sex and relationships education is baffling. What are they so afraid of? Educating young people about safer sex doesn’t lead to an increased sexual activity (that’s from this great Avert resource, by the way). Two words that pop up fairly regularly in the fog of general objection are ‘innocence’ and ‘sexualisation’. I think they’re masking other, simpler causes for so much reactionary guff, but let’s have a look at them anyway.

The idea that the ‘innocence’ of children must be protected at all costs is absurd. Innocence in the criminal sense is a good thing to hold on to, of course. But innocence in the wafty Victorian lamblike sense (aka “freedom from guilt or sin through being unacquainted with evil”)?.  I fail to see the value of being ‘unacquainted with evil’. Knowing about sex isn’t the same as having sex. And also: SEX ISN’T EVIL, GUYS. Besides, it’s a bit of a risk, if you ask me, turning someone loose in the world if they have no concept of evil. They’re in for a nasty shock and quite possibly some dangerous or exploitative situations. Likewise someone who has been kept in the dark about pregnancy, STIs or abuse. Even if you’re working with some kind of arcane points-based system of morality, how can you get your approval for being without sin just because you don’t know what sin is? That’s like congratulating someone on not eating the cookies they didn’t know were there.

Anyway, that’s enough poptheology. Next: ‘sexualisation’, on which I basically agree with Laurie Penny that the word is a “troubling piece of cultural shorthand” which

suggests that sexuality is something that is done to young women, rather than something that they can own and control: that they can never be sexual, only sexualised. This is not a helpful message to send to girls as they begin to explore their sexuality.

The moral panic over “sexualisation” assumes instead that sex is only ever damaging to young women, and that having sex or behaving sexually must be resisted for as long as possible. The problem is not, however, that young women are “growing up too fast” – rather it is that they are growing up to understand that they are erotic commodities, there to be used and abused, shamed if they express legitimate desires of their own, and taught to fear their own bodies.

Child sexual behaviour is complex and difficult to discuss, but it exists. Children have this weird habit of growing up. And it doesn’t work the way the Sun would have it – every girl is an innocent princess until a few moments past midnight on her 16^th birthday, at which point it’s A-OK to start slavering over her. Seriously, until 2004 plenty of Page Three girls were 16. There were even 16^th birthday specials in some other tabloids. Your, er… your double standard is poking out, by the way.

Ewwww Isn’t Good Enough

Critics of broader sex education have done a pretty good job of cosying up to some quarters of the feminist movement, and I’d love to believe that concern over women or children’s wellbeing lay at the heart of the Bailey Review and the media outrage. But it doesn’t. Sexual conservatism is shorthand for a certain kind of morality, and this is a holier-than-thou contest fuelled by the crippling shame and squeamishness about sex that is our shared cultural inheritance. That’s why we feel the need to keep any notion of sex away from children for as long as possible, because on some level, we do think there’s something bad about sex. What other explanation can there be? An otherwise sensible, right-on and feminist former manager of mine once insisted we end a teabreak conversation about how often you should have a sexual health checkup, saying “Can you just stop talking about it please? It makes me feel all ewwww.”

Well, feeling ‘ewwww’ has created a dangerous situation. Without giving children and teenagers a safe space in which to discuss and learn about sex, relationships and sexuality we are creating a vacuum that will be filled by three things: a) whatever their parents choose to tell them; b) all the shit teenagers talk to each other; and c) ideas about sex derived solely from cultural representations of it. Advertising and porn are the big guns here. The version of sex in most porn and advertising isn’t particularly safe, consensual, varied, respectful or even likely to be that much fun (good luck to any women planning on having an orgasm) and the additional messages it peddles about gender identity, power, race and sexual orientation are pretty unhelpful.

Some Scary Numbers

As well as the great Tory terror of teenage pregnancy *cue Hammer Horror evil laughter and lightning strike* this is a public health issue. Although last year there was a small decrease in the total number of STIs diagnosed in England, 2010 still clocked up 418,598 new diagnoses, and the under-25s experience the highest rates of STIs overall. In 2008, the UN reported that globally only 40% of young people aged 15-24 had accurate knowledge about HIV and transmission, while the same group accounted for 45% of all new HIV infections. SRE also presents an opportunity to undermine the stigma faced by people living with HIV through education about transmission without moral judgement. (Stats from here.)

This is important, big picture, long term stuff. It’s very hard to unlearn attitudes and prejudices formed in your early life, and not everyone has an Usborne Guide To Growing Up at hand (even that magnificent volume had its blind spots – Miranda reminded me of the ‘kthanxbai!’ box-out on homosexuality…² ) But there are excellent people fighting the good fight who deserve your support. Here’s a linklist – go show them some well-informed, safe and respectful love.

Campaigns, Organisations and Events

• Education for Choice
• A rallying cry by Zoe Margolis on Comment is Free
• Petition for 21^st C sex and relationships education
• Sex Appeal comedy fundraiser
• National AIDS Trust campaign to get HIV education into classrooms
• Brook
• FPA
• HIVAware
• Avert

Resources and Badass Sex Educators

• Vagina Pagina
• Bish
• Scarleteen
• UNESCO International technical guidance on sexuality education: an evidence-informed approach for schools, teachers and health educators
• Sexedukation
• SRE Project
• Contraception Education
• Dr Petra Boynton
• Dr Petra’s Twitter list of sex educators

1. Ed’s note: I can’t bear linking the Mail and am still in mourning for IstyOsty, but search and ye shall find; it’s titled “Casual Sex and ‘Bad Touching’: Guess What Your Eight Year Old Is Learning At School These Days”. *facepalm*
2. Ed butting in again: has this been expanded yet? Anyone seen if they’ve revised it to be even slightly less heteronormative? *shuts up*

I asked some leading UK pro-choice campaigners whether the US reproductive justice approach introduced in Part 1 is relevant to their work, and what – if anything – might be gained from creating a similar movement in Britain.

Shaming black women

Black British women are, according to Department of Health statistics, more likely to have an abortion than their white counterparts (source).  On the other side of the Atlantic there has been some especially poisonous anti-choice campaigning based around a similar difference. Georgia Right to Life posted 80 billboards around the city of Atlanta proclaiming “Black people are an endangered species”, with a website address: toomanyaborted.com. Loretta Ross, National Co-ordinator of SisterSong, described it as:

a misogynistic attack to shame-and-blame black women who choose abortion, alleging that we endanger the future of our children… Our opponents used a social responsibility frame to claim that black women have a racial obligation to have more babies – especially black male babies — despite our individual circumstances.

Alarmingly, the UK anti-choice movement has already begun to adopt some of the US campaigning messages about the ‘black genocide’. Lisa Hallgarten, Director of Education for Choice, reported that “the Marie Stopes International clinic in Brixton is routinely picketed by antis who claim that MSI is trying to kill black babies. I have seen leaflets that claim that Brook is a eugenic organisation.” This is just the latest trend in a pattern of UK anti-choicers adopting US campaigning tactics.

Reproductive rights

I wanted to know whether the broader ‘reproductive rights’ approach had been adopted in the UK at all, by which I mean looking at contraception, sex education, adoption and the socioeconomic factors which impact on women’s decisions about whether or not to have children alongside calling for the right to safe, legal abortion.

Darinka Aleksic, Abortion Rights Campaign Co-ordinator, said that “because British women do not experience the extremes of health inequalities on ethnic or economic grounds that women in the US do (although I’m not minimizing those that exist), the repro rights approach has not, in my opinion, been quite so vital or so relevant to our situation.”

Lisa agreed that a rights-based approach hasn’t been widely adopted: “Since UK policy can be made or broken by the Daily Mail it is hard to take an abstract political or human rights approach to these things”. But she was clear on some of the problems with the existing situation, including the emphasis on abortion as a medical issue:

The public health approach is fundamentally limited and limiting because it relies on scientific evidence supporting the role of abortion in public health. For me there is a point where personal autonomy may trump public health and we should always keep our commitment to autonomy at the forefront of discussion.

And the absence of universal high quality sex education:

Lack of sex education is a clear obstacle not just to the people who are young at that point in time, but to society getting better at talking about sex. I think, realistically, that some fundamental work needs to be done on coming to terms with human sexuality as a society before anyone will have the courage or funding to stand up in government and take a reproductive justice approach to these things.

Abortion rights and social justice

Finally I asked Lisa and Darinka if it would be helpful to put the campaign to protect and extend abortion rights in the UK in a wider context of social justice, and whether there was a risk of losing support in the medical establishment if it came to be seen as a campaigning issue rather than a question of health policy.

Lisa said that:

Our whole law was put in place to medicalise the procedure, put it under doctors’ control and protect doctors. I think there is a big danger of losing their support if they don’t feel ownership of it.

However, the greater danger is that we don’t have a broad grassroots movement to protect abortion rights in this country. If we built a reproductive justice movement we would have a much more broad-based constituency to come out fighting when our rights are up for grabs in the Commons.

Darinka explained that “Abortion Rights’ primary role is to defend the 1967 Abortion Act.” But also that:

As an organization that has strong links to the trade union movement, we are inclined to stress the importance of abortion access as an economic issue. It has always been working class women who have suffered from a lack of access to safe, legal abortion.

Public service and spending cuts are going to hit women hardest and the reorganization of the NHS raises real questions about how access to abortion and contraception services will be maintained. So we are campaigning against the cuts alongside other organizations on a broader social justice basis.

Reproductive justice for the UK?

After talking to Mara, Lisa and Darinka it became clear that there are opportunities for the UK pro-choice movement in the reproductive justice approach, although simply importing the US model wouldn’t work. In Britain public and medical establishment support for the right to choose is far greater, there are fewer differences in access to healthcare along lines of race or sexual orientation, and there is more state support for families.

However, the British sexual and reproductive health landscape is shifting. While the usual attacks on the Abortion Act are being launched in Westminster (and Abortion Rights tirelessly resists them) a few more developments have been added to the mix over the last year – including controversy around the sterilisation of drug addicts and those with severe learning disabilities, the end of the Teenage Pregnancy Strategy, mass popular protests against the Pope’s visit, the crisis in midwifery, and health professionals calling out shoddy sex education in the media.

While there are a whole range of fantastic organizations working variously to defend and extend abortion rights and access, to improve sex education and sexual health, to support families and advance LGBT and women’s rights, to fight racism and inequalities in access to or influence on public services, this work doesn’t take place under a shared banner of Reproductive Justice.

I am a campaigner; I understand the need to choose your battles and your targets carefully. But as the ideological reforms of what is essentially a Tory government start to bite, I wonder if the battle may be coming to us. Perhaps it’s time to build a movement and raise the flag.

• With thanks to Education for Choice, Abortion Rights and the Abortion Support Network: three amazing charities that deserve your support.

Towards the end of the film there was a section about the ‘reproductive justice’ movement. The interviews intrigued me. It looked exciting, radical, inclusive and even kinda fun. The film featured an endearing group of smart, funny, young activists that reminded me of the Itty Bitty Titty Committee, which is no bad thing in my book. After a few aspirin I was inspired to find out more…

Creative Commons picture by Brooke Anderson, 2006

What is reproductive justice?

Reproductive justice is a holistic, inclusive and intersectional campaign for reproductive rights and the conditions necessary for women to realize them. It is a movement led by women of colour, which addresses the right to have children as well as the right not to have children, expanding the focus out from abortion to include wider questions of sex education, sexuality, birth control and the impact of poverty and violence.  This video is a good introduction: What is Reproductive Justice?

And here it is on Wikipedia for good measure.

I had a quick look online for UK reproductive justice groups or networks, but couldn’t find anything, although the US movement has been around since the 1990s. Of course it’s different terrain – here’s an F Word post about some of the differences between the US and UK around abortion and sex education – but is the reproductive justice approach relevant to the UK at all?

Realising reproductive rights

A key aspect of the reproductive justice approach is integrating pro-choice activism into a wider social justice movement. This is from SisterSong’s document ‘Understanding Reproductive Justice’:

Abortion isolated from other social justice/human rights issues neglects issues of economic justice, the environment, immigrants’ rights, disability rights, discrimination based on race and sexual orientation, and a host of other community-centered concerns directly affecting an individual woman’s decision making process.

By shifting the definition of the problem to one of reproductive oppression (the control and exploitation of women, girls, and individuals through our bodies, sexuality, labor, and reproduction) rather than a narrow focus on protecting the legal right to abortion, we are developing a more inclusive vision of how to move forward in building a new movement.

While defending the rights we are lucky enough to have protected by law is vital, the rights become meaningless if people can’t access them, and in many areas social and cultural change and economic equality are needed for people to realise their rights.

How might this be relevant to the UK pro-choice movement? Although abortion has been legal since 1967, and in theory it is freely available on the NHS, there are major inequalities in access. I spoke to Mara Clarke, founder of the Abortion Support Network, who explains some of the problems:

Abortion is available on the NHS, but only if you obtain two doctors’ signatures. This can be difficult if you live in an area with only one GP who is anti-abortion. Access to abortion services can be as much of a postcode lottery as any other service in the UK… This can make things more difficult for women as not only does the procedure become more invasive the further into pregnancy one gets, but not all clinics perform abortions up to the legal limit. This means some women opt to pay privately for abortions to avoid wait times, where other women have to wait until further in pregnancy and/or travel great distances to obtain the care they require.

Thanks to investment and prioritisation by the previous government, things have improved: 94% of abortions are now funded by the NHS, and waiting times have been drastically reduced. However, these achievements, like many others, are likely to be lost as vicious spending cuts unravel years of positive work.

And in both Northern Ireland – despite being part of the UK – and the Republic of Ireland, abortion is illegal except under extremely restricted circumstances. So every year in order to access safe and legal abortion thousands of women are forced to travel to England and pay anywhere between £400 and £2,000 for the cost of the procedure, travel, childcare and time off work. Abortion Support Network works to help these women by providing financial assistance, information, a meal and a safe place to sleep, but they can’t meet the need on their own.

There’s also a major problem around lack of unbiased information and impartial support around sexual health and pregnancy choices for young people, especially about abortion. Many young women are effectively prevented from making an informed decision because they are misinformed at school, or receive biased advice from bogus counselling services. Education for Choice work to make sure young people have the facts, but they are a tiny organisation fighting a wealthy anti-choice movement.

Abortion and race

The reproductive justice movement particularly addresses the experiences and needs of women of colour around sexual health, parenthood, pregnancy and abortion. While there are not such large differences in access to healthcare by ethnicity in Britain as in the US, there are some patterns. For example, according to Department of Health stats, black British women are almost three times more likely to have an abortion than white women (source).  It’s not clear why this is, but when I asked Darinka Aleksic, Abortion Rights Campaign Co-ordinator, she suggested an economic explanation:

The argument advanced in the US is that because minority ethnic women are more likely to experience poverty and economic disadvantage, the abortion rate among these communities is therefore higher. The Department of Health in England and Wales does not include income levels in its abortion statistics, but Scotland does, and their figures regularly show that abortion rates are higher in economically disadvantaged areas.

As Darinka points out, there is a similar discrepancy in US abortion statistics, and there’s more in Part 2 about how this is being used by the anti-choice movement in America and starting to be used by our own merry band of anti-choicers.

• With thanks to Education for Choice, Abortion Rights and the Abortion Support Network: three amazing charities that deserve your support.

Come back tomorrow for Part 2

Mine was pretty similar (aside from one teacher telling us that an orgasm was like a really good sneeze… no, I don’t know either). Relationships and feelings and other relevant things weren’t discussed, and neither was abortion, despite the girl I sat next to in design tech having had one just the year before.

The A Word

In a way, I am relieved. Because I have seen some of the materials used to discuss abortion in schools all over the country, and they make my blood run cold. Most of it is little better than anti-choice propaganda, and much of it is simply untrue. Abortion makes you infertile, abortion gives you breast cancer… These lies are imparted to young people at the hands of abortion ‘experts’ who are invited into schools, often by well-meaning teachers desperate for guidance on how best to handle ‘the A word’. Young people deserve better than this.

The problem goes far deeper than the curriculum, of course. Abortion happens, whether it is legal or not, safe or not, all over the world. Globally, about 1 in 5 pregnancies end in abortion (some global and local stats). Reluctance to discuss abortion openly and truthfully in the media and in popular culture is doing untold damage to individuals and to women’s precious right to choose. How are teachers and youth workers meant to offer unbiased information and support if they themselves have never had the chance to have an open discussion? To hear the facts?

Secrets and lies

Refusing to tackle the subject of abortion allows stigma to flourish, putting young people facing unplanned pregnancy in a position where they may not even feel able to ask for help. Scaring young women into carrying an unwanted pregnancy to term benefits no one.

But no matter, right? There’s plenty of information freely available, and countless support and counselling services. So here’s a fun game: why not google ‘pregnancy counselling’ and let me know how many of those first page results you reckon are really offering unbiased information? If you find any really choice quotes please comment and share!

Freedom to choose

I’m not assuming all BadRep’s readers are pro-choice, but I’m sure there are some of you. Perhaps, like me, you’ve waved a placard or shouted into a megaphone for a woman’s right to choose and to control her own body.

Standing up for safe, legal abortion is vital, as there are plenty of people who will take any opportunity they can to turn the clock back on reproductive freedom. Some of them are sitting in Westminster right now, deciding your future. (That’s a nice thought, isn’t it?)

But the war is also being waged quietly and efficiently on another front, in our classrooms and in a host of so-called counselling clinics. It’s up to us to expose the propagandists and arm young people with the facts so that they can make their own decisions.

Yes! But how?

Well… *puts on charity trustee hat* Education for Choice are the first line of defence. They are the only UK-based educational charity dedicated to enabling young people to make informed choices about pregnancy and abortion.

With their mighty army of four staff they do heroic battle against the forces of misinformation on a shoestring budget. Times are hard for everyone right now, but in order for EFC to continue working in schools, with youth workers and health professionals, they urgently need your help.

Please:

• Donate £5, £10, or whatever you can spare to their emergency fund
• Pledge your support for the A Word campaign

Help EFC put abortion in the spotlight and make sure that young people’s right to unbiased information is at the top of the agenda.

What else can I do?

• Teach PSHE or know someone who does? Check out these resources.

• Have some time to spare? Become a Champion for Choice.

• Under 21? Have your say on the Youth Advisory Group.

• Have children of your own? Talk to them.