The scouts should stick to tying knots
By Ross Clark, Timesonline
More and more sex education is failing to curb teenage pregnancy. Scoutmasters need not join in
Can there be a youth left in Britain who doesn’t know how to roll on a condom, or that having sex without contraception is liable to result in babies? Such is the prevalence of sex education in schools that it seems to me that any British teenager, unless educated at home and a member of some obscure religious sect, already has sufficient knowledge by the age of 14 to lead a UN birth control programme in a small African nation.
But that hasn’t stopped the Scout Association adding sex education to its own curriculum, starting with six-year-old Beavers. Instead of heading off to camp, Scouts can now look forward to a visit to the local sexual health clinic and role-plays about relationships.
I can understand why the Scouts have been tempted to enter the sex education business. Ever since Lord Baden-Powell, the founder of the Scout movement, issued his immortal advice to young men to bathe their “racial organs” in cold water to counter sexual urges, the Scouts have had to live with an image of sexual repression. It doesn’t help that Baden-Powell, while advocating flogging for scoutmasters caught interfering with their charges, had a friend in Gloucester with a large collection of photographs of naked boys, which Baden-Powell deemed to be “very good”.
Nevertheless, I’m struggling to see what the Scouts can add to a subject that is reaching saturation point in schools and yet has failed so miserably in its objective of reducing teenage pregnancy. A powerful lobby advocates ever more sex education, and will not be happy until it is taught in the pram. But no amount of advocacy can counter the fact that teenagers are far more likely now to be engaged in sexual activity - and cause pregnancies - than they were in Baden-Powell’s day.
Over the past decade, the Government has poured millions into sex education and, bizarrely, claims this to have been a great triumph because the rate of pregnancies among under-18s has declined by a few per cent. In fact, the rate among under-16s has hardly shifted at all, and nor has the overall number of pregnancies. Britain retains, after the US, the second-highest rate of teenage pregnancy in the developed world. Pregnancies might be even higher without the morning-after Pill, now handed out to 12-year-olds. To judge by the rising rates of herpes and genital warts reported by the Health Protection Agency, the amount of unprotected sex between teenagers is sharply on the rise.
The response of the sex education lobby to this record of failure has been to demand even more sex education. The Family Planning Association (FPA), one of the many charities and quangos working in a crowded field, recently said that sex education should start at the age of 4. The government-funded National Foundation for Education Research has demanded that teenagers be given special instruction on how to perform oral sex - on the somewhat dubious premise that, thus satisfied, they won’t be tempted to experiment with vaginal penetration.
What, of course, has never occurred to the sex education lobby is that children might be being fed too much information on sex - to the point at which material designed to dissuade them from engaging in early sexual activity has the opposite effect. As a 16-year-old it never occurred to me that I ought to be having sex - until the Aids awareness campaign came along, after which one felt a complete freak if one weren’t bonking behind the bike sheds.
I am not saying that there shouldn’t have been an Aids awareness campaign - of course there should - but the tone of it, calculated to catch teenage attention, ended up as more of a sex awareness campaign. The advert I remember in particular featured a naked couple, who couldn’t have been more than 16, embracing below the slogan: “It’s that condom moment”. The subliminal message to teenagers was: “This is what you should be up to - if you aren’t, there’s something wrong with you.”
Anyone naive enough to think that teenagers get the message of health campaigns in the way that they are intended to receive it should remember the “heroin screws you up” campaign from the same era - it had to be withdrawn when it became clear that the emaciated youth featured in the campaign had become a sex symbol and that thousands of the posters had been stolen and were plastered over teenagers’ bedrooms.
Unexciting though it might seem to modern educationists, I suspect that the purely factual sex education I received, first through a TV programme at primary school in the 1970s and then in a dry and dusty laboratory at secondary school in the early 1980s, hit probably just the right tone.
Other than perhaps increasing the pregnancy rate among Girl Guides it is hard to see what is to be achieved by talking sex in the Scout hut. By wasting time repeating lessons that their charges have already done several times in school, scout leaders will be stopping them from learning something that they won’t get elsewhere: just find me where on the national curriculum it tells you how to pitch a tent and tie a reef knot.
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