Sex and the young

I'd like to recommend three articles, all in the Daily Mail, to your attention - and invite you to draw the obvious connections between them.

The first article is titled: "Sex clinics 'to open' in EVERY school so pupils as young as 11 can be tested... without parental consent". An extract:

Around a third of secondary schools in England - almost 1,000 - already have clinics. Some are mobile units shared by a number of schools.

Now an influential study, commissioned by the Government, has recommended extending the coverage to all state secondaries and colleges in a drive to cut teenage pregnancies.

Advocates of the approach say children can be deterred from seeking sexual health services if they have to travel to community centres.

But critics say the policy is a 'social experiment' which risks encouraging under-age sex instead of curbing it. Already, the morning-after pill is available to a million schoolgirls.

The second is headlined: "Children aged FIVE expelled for sex offences, girls molested by classmates: Playground bullying takes a shocking twist". A sample:

It is difficult to break this kind of activity into statistics. But the Government did supply us with its most recent figures, compiled in summer 2007, showing that in the previous year there were 3,500 school exclusions for sexual misconduct — which can include anything from daubing sexually explicit graffiti through to serious physical assault.

In 20 cases, the guilty party was only five years old. But informal evidence suggests the problem may be worse. A survey of 11 to 19-year-olds by the charity Young Voice found that one in ten had been forced against their will to take part in sex acts.

How can this be happening? In one sense, the evidence is all around us. Fuelled by a sex-addled culture that parents cannot hope to shield them from, children can be fluent in sexual terminology long before they turn the legal age of consent at 16; often, even, before they hit ten. Sexual words can become sexual actions — so playground bullying is becoming sexual, too.

Michelle Elliott of the charity Kidscape says: ‘Sexual bullying has become much more prevalent. On the Kidscape helpline we used to get maybe one or two calls a year. Now we are getting two or three a week. It’s probably the tip of the iceberg.’

If the emergency calls made to Michelle’s office are the summit of that iceberg, far more are happening lower down the slopes, in routine exchanges between schoolchildren.

The third article is headed: "Grim state of vulnerable young: One in ten youths think their life is 'not worth living' ". Again, a sample:

The poll of more than 2,000 young people by the Prince’s Trust, which aims to help the vulnerable young, is the first large-scale study of its kind.

A worrying 10 per cent, many of whom were not in education, work or training as they started adult life, believed their lives were utterly ‘meaningless’.

Half of those questioned did not feel they had anything to look forward to, while more than a quarter said they were depressed and less happy than when they were younger.

Children’s campaigners said the research should be a wake-up call to ministers about a generation blighted by unemployment and the demise of the traditional family structure.

In case you're thinking, "Well, I don't have to worry about this, because those kids are in England and I'm not" - let me assure you, the problems are just as real, and very similar, here in the USA. Do your own research and you'll find out soon enough.

To my mind, the correlation between these reports is blindingly obvious. If you de-emphasize sex as something intimate, loving and caring, if you make it no more than a physical encounter, removing the romantic element, then the result is the explosion in venereal disease, teenage pregnancy, and other evils that we see in our own back yards.

If you allow the de-mystification of sex to be taken to extremes, so that sex is taught without any connotation of moral values whatsoever, the sexual element in bullying and bad behavior is bound to increase. Why should it not? After all, sex is just another physical thing, like a slap or a punch. You've told them so.

If you persist in denying the patent and self-evident truth that sexual activity is designed by nature to be more than just a physical release; that it incorporates a deeper emotional commitment, particularly for women, that is simply inseparable from the physical act; then is it any wonder that those you've attempted to brainwash in this way find themselves adrift as human beings, without hope, without anything to look forward to, without roots? You've denied one of the most fundamental principles of their humanity. Why be surprised when that has consequences?

I've had to deal with many cases of promiscuity and related issues in people both young and old. The results are always the same. Those who have no respect for the gift of their bodies, who hand it out casually like a toasted cheese sandwich, end up drained of their own personhood, empty shells devoid of the human dignity which was their birthright.

You deny or ignore that truth at your peril.

Peter