Sex education should be mandatory to all. Here’s why

There’s a TV show I absolutely love. It’s in its third season, and follows a group of teenagers navigating school, their hormonal romances, and life at a high school in general before launching into ‘real’ life. The characters are well written, the scenarios are believable and relatable, even though the school is in the UK, and the comical moments are truly hilarious – all the while managing to tackle some pretty heavy themes: abuse, mental health, parenting, bullying, and lots of others.

The show is called Sex Education, and it truly is an education. The episodes range from the funny – how does one measure what size is sufficient while comparing to everyone else in the locker room? – to slightly bizarre – what happens when your boyfriend only wants to sext as if he’s a hero in Outlander or Vikings – to serious – does a relationship end when you realise that the assault you suffered has made you never want to be physically intimate again? And should you tell your partner?

Every time I watch this show, I am supremely entertained and educated, as you would guess from the title, even though I’m not a teenager, and not the target audience. But then I also wonder if the target audience is watching shows like these, shows that don’t beat around the bush concerning what sex actually is. 

When I was a teenager, the total aggregation of my sex information was misinformed peers and Sidney Sheldon’s steamy stories. Obviously, not enough. By the time I got to high school, the only narrative we were being fed was to abstain (news flash – abstinence doesn’t work for everyone), and to remember that boys could get you pregnant and your life would be ruined forever. The point of a comprehensive sex education syllabus for schools is supposed to be this: to allow for actual information for people who want to go to school, continue to progress in their lives and make good choices.

I wonder if I would have made different choices, had I known then what I know now, had I watched then what I watch now. The journey of sexual knowledge – liberation, if you will -  is fraught with such mystery, it almost seems like we’re being hypocritical as a society. Everyone is here because of sex, but we want to pretend it isn’t happening. Marketing companies, advertisements, businesses, use sex daily, to sell everything from hospital insurance to car parts and juice. How is it that we are so willing to show it, but not talk about it, or talk to the children about it? This is against the varied groups of people – parents, religious leaders, the Ministry of Health – who all think we should not. 

According to the National Adolescent Sexual and Reproductive Health Policy 2015, adolescent pregnancy and childbearing are common in Kenya. Almost a quarter of Kenyan women give birth by the age of 18, and nearly half by the age of 20. There is no information being given to these girls – even though there are programs at the forefront trying to do this, like Faya, which supports counties with high teen pregnancy rates to reduce these numbers and get girls through school. 

Why are there so few – even though we know for a fact that this education means girls are more likely to escape poverty? I mean degrees and diplomas but also the other kind that leads to conversations that say yes, abstinence can be done, if that is what you believe in and can adhere to…and if not, this is what protecting yourself looks like. This is what saying no looks like. This is who to call if you find yourself in this situation.

We need to get to a point where we’re not preaching at young adults, but actually caring for them at a level that they understand, to have better judgement. Sure, we can all pretend that no one is having sex, but the numbers show different. Not everyone can learn from a TV show.

I wish someone would have told me that saying no isn’t always the easiest thing to do. I wish someone had told me that sex isn’t shameful. I wish someone had told me that you can’t be so hard on people who make different choices – or had different choices, or no choices at all – because you don’t understand their lived experiences. I would have been better, and I probably would have been kinder.

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