The debate over whether sex ed should be abstinence-based or comprehensive is intensifying in the MeToo era. More than 30 states stress abstinence, while 10 require schools to teach the idea of consent — contact that’s freely given.
High school freshmen listen to Wexford County prosecutor Jason Elmore talk about consent and criminal sexual conduct on Wednesday, April 17, 2019, in Cadillac, Mich. Among other things, he reminded them that the legal age of consent for sexual contact in the state of Michigan is 16. Most of the students in these classes are younger than that.
“We’re talking about dating violence, sexual assault, relationships, #MeToo — all of those things. I think you have to be intentional about bringing this program into our classrooms,” says David Blue, the school’s director of diversity and inclusion. “How do you look at all of these constant conversations in our society right now?”
The divide over how to teach sex ed has long split on the question of whether kids are “sexual beings,” said Jonathan Zimmerman, an education professor at the University of Pennsylvania. And Oklahoma lawmakers this year considered a bill that would have forced high schools to teach consent. Called “Lauren’s Law,” the measure was named for a teen who said she was raped at a high school party. The Legislature eventually passed a narrower measure requiring that schools with a sex ed curriculum incorporate teaching about consent. It leaves other districts of the hook, but state Sen. Carol Bush, the Republican sponsor, called it “baby steps.
In Cadillac, Michigan, a reliably Republican town of about 10,500 people, school leaders proactively teach consent after the school board voted more than a decade ago to change its sex ed curriculum from “abstinence only” to “abstinence based.” These days county prosecutor Jason Elmore regularly visits the town’s high school to deliver a sometimes startling message about consent.
In Tennessee, where the state mandates an abstinence-based curriculum, some teenagers are leading their own discussions about consent. The state’s sex ed law, known as the 2012 “Gateway Law,” not only prohibits the discussion of sexual activities that stop short of intercourse — so-called “gateway sexual behaviors” — it imposes $500 fines on instructors who wade into the topic.
Measures like Tennessee’s “Gateway Law” are not meant to chill discussion on important issues, Mosack said, but to limit those that stray too far into supposed safe-sex topics such as “naked cuddling” and “showering together.” “Abstinence until marriage in America in 2019? It’s an impossible goal,” said Santilli, who studies pediatrics and population health and said that more than half of Americans have sex before leaving high school. “On the other hand, I think we ought to tell young people if they’re not ready to have sex with people, if they’ve had too much to drink, if they somehow feel uncomfortable with somebody, they can say no. To me, that’s feminism in action.
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