Since our early teenage years are seen as some of our most impressionable, many public middle schools employ people to come and warn the Easily Influenced Youth about two of Life’s Great Dangers: sex and drugs.
If your middle school experience was anything like mine, you were forced to watch overly enthusiastic “sex ed” professionals slide a condom onto a banana more times than you’d have liked.
You were also subjected to numerous lectures from a dude in a beanie telling you not to smoke weed, while simultaneously making getting high sound so dangerous and exciting that although your PBS-watching, butterfly hair clips-wearing ass had never so much as thought the word “marijuana” before, you found yourself wondering how you could obtain some.
What you didn’t hear anyone talk about was consent.
Although sexual consent classes are now required in public high schools across California, high school is too late to be teaching children about consent. Consent should be a mandatory part of every child’s education, starting in middle school, and not just in California. Children in every state across the country need to learn early on exactly what consent is and why it’s so important. Obviously, children in every country in the damn world should be taught about consent, but, baby steps.
Because middle school is, typically, the first time in a child’s life that they’re allowed to go places without a parent chaperone and hang out with friends on their own, middle school is inevitably when kids get exposed to things their parents didn’t introduce them to, such as MTV, music with sexual lyrics, and their fellow 13-year-old classmates rubbing their genitals on each other at school dances. (Or, as we called it when I was in middle school, “freak dancing.”)
Therefore, schools need to start instilling the importance of consent at the same time that kids start trying to simulate sex on the dance floor while listening to 50 Cent express his plan to take Olivia to the candy shop.
That way, little Chad might grow up understanding that he needs to ask the pretty girl to the school dance if she’d like to dance with him before he comes up and starts gyrating his crotch on her butt. He also might grow up knowing that even if he asks, it is 100 percent within the pretty girl’s right to say no and that if she says no, he has to respect that.
If Chad was taught this when he is first introduced both to pretty girls and groups of people waving their private parts at each other in dark, sweaty rooms, he would almost certainly be less likely to turn into That Guy at the club who thinks it’s OK or grab women he doesn’t know and then be rude or condescending if the women push him off.
According to the Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network (RAINN), “sexual violence has fallen by more than half since 1933.” And that’s amazing! But here’s the thing - it shouldn’t be. It shouldn’t be “amazing” that people inappropriately touched other people without consent less this year than in 1933 because people shouldn’t do it at all.
If you’re reading this thinking that consent classes are too intense for middle school students (or any children, for that matter), consider the following:
One in six American women has been the victim of a rape or rape attempt, also according to RAINN. Meaning, if you’re sitting in a room with six of your female acquaintances, statistically, someone has tried to rape one of them.
According to the 2016 National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) - which measures all sexual assaults, even those that weren’t reported to law officials - there were 431,840 total incidents of rape or sexual abuse in 2015. However, the 2016 Uniform Crime Report stated that there were 90,185 rapes reported to law enforcement in the same year. That’s a lot less than the total incidences of sexual abuse in 2015. That means that statistically, of the many women who are sexually abused every year, not many of them will report it - so the perpetrators will get off scot-free, and this s**t will continue to happen.
Sure, some schools have sex ed, but we need more. We need to teach children that no means no and that everyone has the right to say no - not just how to put a condom on a damn banana.