THE WAR AGAINST YOUNG PEOPLES’ SEXUALITY Especially in an era of sexually transmissible infections that can prove fatal we need to be very critical about what acts are exactly harmful to minors and singles, and what we should , and should not, be trying to protect our children from; and how we can separate legitimate worries from irrational panics; real dangers from false alarms. We need to examine the myriad ways our culture attempts to control, monitor, suppress and even eradicate young peoples’ access to information about sexuality, sexual health and reproduction – and how it pathologises and criminalizes young peoples’ sexual expression. It is the thesis of this essay that young people are far more harmed by misguided attempts at “protection” than they would be by having full access to honest information about sexual health and safety. We need to confront the continuing national panic and convincingly argue that socially conservative beliefs and policies are largely to blame for the problems they purport to address. We all need to recount how conservative right-wing agencies, through sham social science, media sensationalism and self-righteous promotion, convinces the mainstream that sex is by nature dangerous to young people. Part of this essay will highlight new dangers of sex today and then go on to argue the still shocking notion that all young people who are potentially sexually active are entitled to basic sexual freedom, privacy and pleasure. The idea behind this discourse is the assumption that it should not be discussed at all. The hope is that young people of all ages might learn to find joy in the realm of the senses, the world of ideas and souls, so that when sex disappoints and love fails, as they will, a teenager, a grown-up still has him or herself, a universe of small delights and strong hearts to fall back on. In the western world and in the east as well we are in the midst of a sexual crisis. All around us is virtually every sexual problem: teenage pregnancy, abortion, rape, incest, child abuse, sexually transmitted disease including HIV/AIDS, unwanted abandoned babies to name just a few. Yet when anyone issues a call to action on sexual health urging comprehensive sex education and other measures to promote responsible sexual behaviour and advocates that we break out of our conspiracy of silence about sexuality, we want to run them out of town. Sexually transmitted diseases ranging from the serious to the fatal, are a fact of life in schools and neighbourhoods across the regions. Misinformation and scare tactics about common sexual practices like masturbation and same sex attraction are rampant. Despite  these facts and despite the overwhelming desire that our young people be healthy and well and responsible, our society remains unwilling to make sexuality part of a comprehensive health education program at school as well as at home. Public health policy concerning sexuality education appears to be ideologically motivated rather than empirically driven. No matter how widespread, politically viable or popular a program may be , efficacy in preventing and modifying behaviour associated  with this sexual crisis must remain the primary criteria  by which programs are changed.   During my life I have moved from  complete, faithbased, community imposed silence about sex, to dealing professionally almost daily with some of the real issues about sexuality. I know first hand what it was like to be ignorant and I also know how vital it is to be informed. I have talked with parents who have just learned that their newborn baby was born with sexually ambiguous genitalia and with doctors proposing gender reassignment surgery based on what is the easiest to perform rather than waiting for an overall orientation to become apparent. I have constantly tried to educate people and develop social policies that address problems that are eating away at the fabric of society  - teenage pregnancy, inescapable poverty, ignorance and enslavement, and HIV/AIDS and other sexually transmissible diseases. The day-in, day-out nature of this work leads me to be impatient with people who object to those who advocate the use of condoms for instance. As Ira Reiss states so eloquently in a recent book “the vows of abstinence break far more easily than do latex condoms.” Hysteria about sex has hindered attempts to address these pressing concerns, and the people hurt most are those who most need  the information – our young people, the poor, rural and tribal folk and the uninformed. Ignorance in this instance is not bliss. Judith Levine passionately argues for honest and forthrightness in talking to young people about sex and lays bare the conservative political agenda that underlies many supposed “child protection” efforts. Dr Jocelyn Elders makes a good point when referring to the religious right  as having a feeling of disgust with people whose religious views cause them to have a love affair with a fetus but won’t take care of children once they have been born. We need to give crucial importance to frank and accurate information about sexuality and make it widely available to people of all ages. Treating sex as dangerous is dangerous in itself! There is an intimate connection between the values we display in our sexual lives and the values we display as a society. Sex is a moral issue but not the way the religious right teaches it. Young people need to be taught sexual ethics and responsibility, inside and outside the home, just as they are taught how to behave in any number of public and private arenas. Teaching young people to have self respect, to feel good about themselves, to make good decisions based on facts and not hysteria, is sexual education. What we need to do is investigate and expose the policies and practices that affect young peoples’ sex lives – censorship, psychology, sex education, family, criminal and reproductive law and the journalism and parenting advice that begs for solutions while often exciting more terror and often accomplishing the opposite to so called “child protection” As the economy globalizes its newly created wealth for some only provides provisional and selective security. The social correlate of economic privatization is “family values”. Citizenship is a matter of intimate life reserved only for families. It disenfranchises everyone who is not a card-carrying family member – singles, gays, lesbians, runaway youths and neglected elderly. Parenting has become an escalating trial of tougher standards for success and surer penalties for failure. Since the mid eighties political articulation around this social and economic precariousness has escalated and panic about young peoples’ sexuality has mounted with it with the fears clustering around women and children. Two streams came together from two sources – feminists concerned about widespread reports of rape and domestic sexual violence, and the religious right who believe women and children need special protection because they are “naturally” averse to sex of any kind. The feminists argued that explicit erotica and sex work was violence and abuse against women and the religious conservatives, mostly middle class women, who felt their “traditional” families were being threatened by the social/sexual upheavals of the time, which they translated into profanity in the form of abortion, divorce, homosexuality, pre-marital teen sex and sex educationalists all encroaching on the sanctity of families. Even today a complex social chemistry of deliberate political strategy, professional opportunism and popular suspension of disbelief, sexual discomfort is being heated to alarm and is about to boil into widespread panic. Media reports that children are facing much more danger, much more terrible than their parents had ever faced. The story behind these stories was that of more teen sex starting earlier and becoming more sophisticated sooner with more dire consequences. In one sense of course this is true. Earlier physical maturity coupled with later marriage means that fifteen to twenty years elapses between physical sexual readiness and official sexual legitimacy, It is therefore hardly surprising that almost 90% of mature young people have intercourse before they wed, if they wed at all, and most do so in their teen years. One in four can be expected to contract a sexually transmitted disease each year with genital herpes, gonorrhea and Chlamydia leading the list. On the other hand the fear that children are having intercourse in middle school is largely unfounded – only 2 in 10 girls and 3 in 10 boys do so by the age of 15 according to overseas research findings. From the same research teens in the 1990’s compared to their parents in the 1970’s and grandparents in the 1950’s the figures are not galloping upwards. In the time of our grandparents the rate of teens reporting pre-marital sex  was 40% with 25% for girls. During the 1970’s these numbers increased substantially with more females becoming active, a position enhanced by the ready availability of birth control devices. By 1984 the sexually active 15 – 19 year olds was just under 50%. Since then increases in teen sex have been smaller with a bit of a drop off in recent years. In 1990’s the numbers went up to 55% and by 1995 it dropped back to 50% right where it was in 1984. Furthermore no matter how many teens are counted as sexually active, meaning that they had intercourse at least once, that activity is various and scant. In one typical study of sexually active boys aged 15 to 19 years in the 1990’s more than half admitted they had done it fewer than 10 times in the previous year and 10% had not had sex, as they defined it, at all. As one researcher and the writer’s own data confirm ‘most sexually active teens are not very sexually active’. Despite the less than electrifying facts almost every major report on teen sexuality is pitched with staples of sensationalism. In almost every article or broadcast, experts are called in to catalogue the reasons teens have sex, all of them bad; their peers pressure them, or pedophiles manipulate them; they drink or drug too much, listen to rap music or download porn; they are under too much pressure or aren’t challenged enough; they are abused or abusive or feel immortal or suicidal; they are rich and spoiled or poor and demoralized; raised too strictly or too permissively; they are ignorant or over sophisticated. In fact mostly the pundits are all only text book guessing. Conservative legislators have effectively shut down government funded research on adult sexual behaviour, motives or feelings. As for surveying minors about the same subjects this is practically illegal. Squeamish or ignorant about facts parents appear willing to accept the pundits worst conjectures about their children’s sexual motives. It is as if they cannot imagine that their kids seek sex for the same reasons that they do. They like or love the person they are having it with. It gives them a sense of beauty, worthiness, happiness and power. And it feels good.   HIV/AIDS shadows these fears and exaggerations, and it feeds the fear mongers. It has become the symbol of all that is hidden and unknowable about sex – a fact exacerbated especially in Africa and India by public health official’s and health educator’s reluctance to disseminate terror-quelling data and proven methods of containment to teens. Preventable, the disease has come to stand  for uncontrollable, which is the soul of terror, And if sex is the carrier of calamity, discussion of pleasure is unseemly, even rash. Today there’s evidence that teens are learning to handle the dangers while enjoying the pleasures of sex but this is not systematic across all groups of sexually active teens. (By 1990’s they were more consistent condom users than their elders) Yet teen sex  is still viewed as the most uncontrollable, the most calamitous. Commonly in the professional literature , sex amongst young people is referred to as a “risk factor”  along with binge drinking, drug taking and gun play, and the loss of virginity as the “onset” of intercourse, as if it was a disease. One of the journals that frequently reports on teen sexual behaviour is actually called “Morbidity and Mortality”. As history lives on we still invest children with romantic innocence. The Victorian fear of the poisonous knowledge of worldly sexuality is still with us; lately it’s re-emerged in the demonic power we invest in the Internet. Since Freud the sexuality of children and adolescents is officially “natural” and “normal”  yet the meaning of these terms are ever in dispute and expert advice dispensed in self help groups and parenting columns serves only to lubricate anxiety: Is the child engaged in sex too soon, too much? Is it sex of the wrong kind, with the wrong person, the wrong meaning? Young people continue to live out their diverse heritages and the modern family is vexed by its Victorian inheritance: the self-canceling task of inducting the child into the social world of sexuality and at the same time protecting her from it. And just as the grimy, glittery realities of young people’s lives in the industrialized cities of the nineteenth century clashed with the ideology of innocent childhood and its enforcement, events in the twentieth century have tended to pull children and their sexuality in two directions at once. Beginning with the child protectionist reforms of the Progressive Era, law and ideology have laid stone upon stone in the official wall between childhood and adulthood. At the same time, the century’s cultural, political and economic developments have  been bashing away at that wall, most violently at its weakest point, the in-between stage of adolescence. The Depression and World War 2 pushed teens into the work force, out on the road, to the battlefront and into freer sexual arrangements. In the post war years, the automobile gave them mobility; their newly flush parents and a booming economy gave them spending money. And the mass media gave them knowledge. By the end of the twentieth century the traditional landmarks of adult enfranchisement had been scattered into disorder. Marriage can now follow  the establishment of a household, a career, and a credit history; the birth of a child can predate all of these. Pre-teens enroll in universities; adults return to school at midlife; young surrogate mothers gestate babies for women who want to start families after their reproductive years are past. Many grown ups live single and childless all their lives. As the plots of late-modern life live out it becomes harder to distinguish the characters of child and adult. While remaining utterly dependent in many ways, children worldwide share in every aspect of the work and play of the great communities of adults – labour and commerce, entertainment, crime, warfare, marriage, and sex. Though we locate them in separate political category, a medical and psychological speciality, a social subculture, and a market niche, young people may be more like adults than they have been since the seventeenth century. Current youth policy and parenting advice teeter between high-anxiety child protection and high-anger child punishment. Here is one striking pair of contradictory trends – As we raise the age of consent for sex, we lower the age at which a wrong-doing child may be tried and sentenced as an adult criminal. Both, needless to say, are “in the best interests” of the child and society. Most adults want to save young people the pain and possible harms of sex. But some feel that the risks outstrip  almost all young people’s abilities to contend with them; others just think sex is wrong unless the person is of legal age, heterosexual and married. In raising this question of ‘whether’ and ‘when’ we need to make some important global distinctions. Not everywhere in our global village are these questions so indelible. Sex education in many countries begins with the assumption that young people will carry on a number of sexual relationships during their teen years and initiate sex play short of intercourse long before that, (which they do even in India and Africa) and that sexual expression is a healthy and happy part of growing up. The goal of sex-ed, which grows out of a generally more relaxed attitude towards sexuality, is to make sure that this sexual expression is healthy and happy, by teaching the young person the values of responsibility and the techniques of safety and even pleasure. Abstinence is rarely emphasized if it is discussed at all. What also needs to be remembered is that currently homophobia and misogyny are robust in our schools and dating violence is rampant. In part because of this youthful bigotry anecdotal evidence  indicates that many kids, especially but not exclusively girls, are having sex they don’t want or do not enjoy. Four million teenagers are infected with sexually transmitted infections each year and half of the 40,000 new HIV infections each year are with people under 25 (USA statistics only) In India HIV /AIDS is the leading cause of death among people aged 15 to 49. Many are from the most productive sectors such as transport construction, mining and agriculture. Sex among young people like sex among its adults is too often gender unfriendly or not pleasurable or not safe. This essay argues that that current psychological, legal and educational practice exacerbates rather than mitigates this depressing state of affairs. It contends that sex is not in itself harmful to minors or single teens and adults. Rather, the real potential for harm lies in the circumstances under which some children and teens have sex, circumstances that predispose them to what public health people call ‘negative outcomes’, such as unwanted pregnancy and sexually transmitted disease, not to mention of course just plain bad sex. Not surprisingly, these are the same conditions that set young people up to suffer many other miseries. Some, such as the denial or denigration of female or gay desire, may express themselves differently in different economic classes and social locations but they strike everywhere. Many are unequal-opportunity afflictors. More than 80% of teen mothers come from poor homes. A hugely disproportionate number of youngsters with AIDS are class minorities from poorer urban areas, Even incest correlates with poverty and the family chaos that is woven closely with it. Children from low-income families are eighteen times more likely to be sexually abused at home. It is these unhappy conditions, and not the desire for physical intimacy, not pornographers or abortions, not even HIV, that leaves a young person with her defenses down, loitering in harms way. Poor people are not less moral than rich people. But poverty, like sex, is a phenomenon rooted in moral priorities, a result of deliberate fiscal and social policies that obstruct the fair distribution of health, education, and wealth in countries everywhere. The result is often an unfair distribution of sexual health and happiness too. Sex is a moral issue. But it is neither different nor a greater moral issue than many other aspects of human interaction. Sex is not a separate category of life. Youthful sexuality can be moral or immoral. And so can our treatment of young people who desire it and act on that desire. This essay claims that sex is not ipso facto harmful to young teens and our persistent drives to protect them from sex is really protecting them from nothing. Instead it is often harming them. If we want to be credible about about sexual responsibility we have to be forthright about sexual joy. If parents want their kids to be happy now and later, it is their duty and should be their delight, to help them to learn to love well, which is to say respectfully of others and themselves, skillfully in body and heart, morally as lovers, friends and citizens. For our part, adults owe young people not only protection and a schooling in safety but also the entitlement to pleasure. The twin concepts of innocence and ignorance are vehicles for adult double standards. A child is ignorant of she doesn’t know what adults want her to know, but innocent if she doesn’t know what adults don’t want her to know. The age of innocence has for many come to an end, often tragically, but for all sexually active people, circumstances now require that it be banished for all time. I want to close with some comments about the HIV virus itself. For those readers in India and Africa, including some doctors, who choose to privately believe that there is no human immuno deficiency virus (HIV) please skip this part. In the 1980’s all we had was a syndrome manifesting in damaged immune functions and leading to patients dying rapidly from opportunistic diseases that are normally controlled in a healthy body. Eventually scientists discovered the body’s natural reaction to the presence of this virus when it mounted its own weak defenses. These defenses were natural antibodies which were not totally effective but which appeared some time after the infection with the virus. It is the time period when these antibodies started to appear naturally that is a very important principle for anyone who has had a risk exposure needs to understand. This time period following infection and when the body starts its own fight back is called the window period. Of course even though antibodies can’t be detected immediately, infection can be transmitted as the virus moves very rapidly once it has successfully changed hosts. The speed with which antibodies can be detected depends on the degree of capacity the immune system has to respond. The more preoccupied the immune system is with pre-existing illness the slower the appearance of antibodies capable of being detected. A test too soon after a risk exposure can produce a false negative test result even though the virus may be present but antibodies are not yet evident. It is this reason that delays in testing after risk are advised. If antibodies are not detected after 30 days it is a reliable indicator that exposure has not occurred. WHAT IS A RISK EXPOSURE? To understand risk one has to understand the sensitivity of the virus. When scientists began testing virus particles it was discovered that the virus was extremely sensitive to temperature variation. Any variation greater than 3 degrees centigrade sustained for some time meant the virus lost its strength and eventually died. Exposure to air, saliva, digestive enzymes, stomach acid and even mild detergents were lethal to virus particles. The virus also has a preferred type of cell that it finds easier to penetrate. These cells are found  easily and in abundance in certain parts of the anatomy. They abound in vaginas and are also found under foreskin in uncircumsized penises. Anal tissue is also more sensitive to abrasion which allows virus particles to enter blood streams. All of these parts of the body, when joined without the protection of latex in various forms, condom, femidom, dental damns, are perfect laboratory conditions for transmission of virus. No variation of temperature, no air, none of the other destructive secretions and these constitute the major routes of transmission – unprotected anal and vaginal intercourse. The other routes are sharing injecting equipment with an infected person, flawed medical procedures involving blood, and perinatal transmission from mother to child. Questions are often raised about oral sex but the degree of susceptibility of the mouth for a successful transmission of HIV is unlikely to lead to oral sex being very comfortable e.g extraction of teeth or significant mouth ulceration. Global epidemiology statistics do not reflect transmission of HIV from oral sex. Other treatable sexually transmissible infections can be transmitted orally. These can also be prevented by regular medical checkups and intelligent behaviour sexually. Research also shows that there is a significant relationship between substance use and high risk sexual activity but substance abuse does not cause sexual risk taking. Compilation of research shows at-risk teens tend to engage in several inter-related high risk behaviours at once. Research also indicates that as many as 35 percent of young gay males and 30 percent of lesbians have considered or tried suicide and in India a much higher percentage of lesbians success in self-annihilation. It can be argued convincingly that poverty is still the greatest risk factor for every life smashing condition a kid might be at risk for, save perhaps compulsory shopping. No where is this more obvious than in India and Africa where children are abused and their development tending to be stunted as a result of a broad range of perfectly legitimate social policies and public practices which cause, permit and perpetuate poverty, inadequate nutrition, physical and mental ill health, unemployment, substandard housing and neighbourhoods, polluted and dangerous environments, schooling devoid of meaningful education, widespread lack of opportunities and despair. The massive abuse and destruction of children and young people shows up all around us and is a by-product of the normal workings of our established social order and its political, economic and cultural institutions. I am not saying of course that we should only worry about nutrition and housing instead of worrying about sex. Rather I conclude that that the way we organize our economic lives and the way we conduct our sexual lives and teach our children to conduct their’s are inter-connected. “Family Values” will not make the world safe for children and surely not sexually safe. For starters most child abuse happens inside the family and most often by a heterosexual adult. And if economic security and a sense of shared responsibility by all adults for all children are among the requisites of sexual safety, “family values” endanger children at home and everywhere else. As would be obvious to most, it is out in the world, as much as in the home, that children learn to be friends, workers and lovers. Sex is a moral issue, but teaching sexual values is a redundancy. The same things that make you a solid member of your grade school class – co-operation, respect and integrity – also make you a considerate lover, a consistent safe sex practitioner, a person able to say yes and no to sex and honour the consent of the partner. What will impede a young person as she steps into the currents? The hierarchies of race, gender, and beauty that makes her doubt herself and despise others that are different. And what will buoy a young person? Knowledge and pride in her body, freedom for her feelings, adult respect for his intelligence, will and privacy. Good food and a secure kitchen in which to eat it, greenspace, libraries filled with books and computers, family and friends with the time and the means to love without hurting the young person. A community that cares for its smaller weaker members as much as it recognizes its aggressive and successful. Sex is not harmful to young people. It is a vehicle of self knowledge, love, healing, creativity, adventure and intense feelings of aliveness. Our moral obligation to the next generation is to make a world in which  every post-pubescent young person can partake safely, a world in which the needs and desires or every person  for accomplishment, connection, meaning and pleasure – can be marvellously fulfilled, and where  sexually transmissible diseases can be a historic memory, rather than a lurking danger. Geoff Heaviside Brimbank Community Initiatives Inc Incorporated in Victoria Australia gheaviside@rediffmail.com MARCH 2004