Sex, Ethics, and Young People

M. Carmody

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781137405975
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Estudios de género

Sex, Ethics, and Young People brings together research and practice on sexuality and violence prevention education. Carmody focuses on showing how the challenges faced by young people negotiating their sexual lives can be addressed by a six week interactive skill based Sex and Ethics Program.

Part I

Young People, Sex, and Sexual Assault Prevention

Chapter 1

Thinking Critically about Sexuality Education

One afternoon in the mid-1960s at my high school in Sydney, Australia, all the girls were taken to the assembly hall. We were shown a film that contained many diagrams of the male and female reproductive systems. There was no movement in the slides used, no sense of context—just as there was no discussion, nor any call for questions. As we filed out, we were given a booklet with a picture of a bride on the front cover. Inside was information about menstruation and how to manage it. We returned to the classroom to the bemused curiosity of the boys. They wanted to know what had happened. Most of us refused to tell them. We had no idea. We were mystified, but we knew enough to not tell the boys. At my school, there were no sexuality education classes for boys. My friend Michael tells me he went to a father-and-son night in about 1965. He didn’t get it either. There were no discussions in classes about what we heard in the hall, and there was certainly no mention of sexual assault, date rape, or domestic violence.

Sometime later, my friend Jenny and I were in a domestic science class, decked out in our white starched caps and white aprons. We looked like a cross between a domestic servant and a nurse. The teacher was droning on about the need to prepare good, wholesome meals for our husbands. Husbands seemed a long way off. We were much more interested in reading the latest book I had got hold of—Mary McCarthy’s 1963 novel, The Group. With the novel tucked inside my exercise book, I read a passage that, for the first time in my life, explained what sex between a man and a woman involved. It described Dottie, one of the female characters, losing her virginity to Dick, a married man. I passed it to Jenny. We couldn’t wait to get out of class. We talked about it endlessly; we puzzled at the mechanics, pondered the biology, and, for a while, we were convinced it wasn’t true. Being avid readers, we sought out many other books and finally concluded it was true. We were left feeling somewhat underwhelmed. What was it that caused so much unspoken anxiety around us?

These stories seem far removed from the options available to young women and men today. With the click of a mouse, they can find sexual information and see videos of sexual acts on the Internet. All is graphically revealed, at least to those who can bypass the various filters that might be in operation. There also seems to be greater openness to discussion. Government-funded state schools in Australia, and in many other countries, mostly have some form of personal development curriculum with opportunities for both women and men to interact, ask questions, and expect direct answers from teachers.

Despite this, the young women and men who participated in the research that underpins this book found much of what passes for sexuality education lacking. As a schoolgirl, I was struggling to get even biological information I could relate to—let alone anything that addressed the feelings and confusions I experienced. Similarly, despite the apparently more open discussion of sexuality today in the community, and within school curricula, the young people in my study reported feeling confused and pressured. They saw themselves as lacking in knowledge and skills to safely begin their sexual lives. Some of this can be attributed to the anxiety of moving into new territory. Whatever its name, sexuality education for young people is still often contentious, still too often done only in the name of biology or risk, and still caught up in moral anxiety. Sex often remains embedded in a romance narrative that has little room for the practical circumstances of everyday life.

Yet the facts are clear. The age of first sexual experience continues to get lower, even as the range of sexual activities involved widens. Parents, sex educators, teachers, youth workers, researchers, and politicians continue to worry. The latter often frequently see it as an indication of the “moral” decline of contemporary society. At the same time, high levels of pregnancy, sexually transmitted infections (STIs), coerced or pressured sex, and sexual assault among young people suggest that current approaches to preparing young people for sexually active lives is limited in reaching them on their terms.

Those terms are, of course, what are at stake in the wider discussion. In the wider context, they create the interface between sexuality, sexuality education, and violence prevention. How can young people be heard in any dialogue about the realities of their lives, sexuality education, pleasure, and danger? How might such a dialogue affect violence prevention? And how might it include pleasure and desire?

Sexuality and Violence Prevention Education in Dialogue

A unique feature of this book is the bringing together of research and other scholarship on both sexuality and violence prevention education. You may be wondering why a book with a title about sex is concerned with sexual assault prevention, or why sexual assault prevention includes consideration of issues regarding sex. There are several reasons. First, I argue that, for too long, sexuality education has denied the full range of young people’s (and other’s) experiences of sexual intimacy. It is more than biology. It covers a wide range of experiences, from the desire for and the negotiating of pleasures—physical and emotional, committed and casual—to the downright ordinary (“is that all it is?”). Sadly, for many, it also includes varying degrees of pressure, coercion, and sexual assault. This book identifies new ways of thinking about sex, sexual assault, and the prevention of violence. Violence prevention strategies are developed inside a sexual ethics framework that values pleasure at the same time as it acknowledges danger.

My argument is not that anything goes. Rather, I’m interested in what young people do when negotiating intimacy, sex, and love, and how they might be supported to do this well. There are some good sexuality education materials that take similar approaches. These too are often limited in their impact by restrictions on what can occur in schools, by inadequate training, and the constant need to defend them against attack. These conversations, or the lack of them, reflect the social and political contexts that frame what it is possible to speak of in any given historical moment. This is the wider contested field where discussion of sexual ethics takes place. It is not, as some would have it, simply a matter of sexuality education versus abstinence.

The evidence says that abstinence-based programs do not produce positive, sexual health outcomes. Nor do they prevent sexual violence. Quite frankly, I’m fed up with sex getting a bad rap, and the education for young people being primarily focused on the risk of STIs, or sexual assault. While risk matters, and is part of any sexual ethics framework, it is neither the only story, nor representative of the bigger picture. For too long, STIs, fear of pregnancy, and sexual assault have been used to narrate sex negatively, to the exclusion of the positive aspects of sex and what this means to many young people and others.

This book positions violence prevention in relation to these wider questions of sexual ethics and sexuality education, especially for young people. This required me to rethink what was being done in the name of violence prevention. In the process, I drew on many sources. I reflected also on what had occurred over the 30 years I have been involved in the field, as a social worker, program developer, and researcher. I listened to what practitioners told me, and to young people and what they said, and to what I learned from my own research and that of others. I drew my own conclusions.

Put bluntly, violence prevention education has focused on the “bad” things that can happen, and it too provides only a partial perspective on intimacy in all its forms. In a sense, how could it not? This partial perspective was crucially important historically. It allowed all of us in the feminist movement to name sexual assault and other forms of intimate violence, and make them visible in the media, in the law, and to policymakers. It allowed us to challenge social denial (of domestic violence, rape in marriage, and date rape) and the ways in which women were made responsible for “inciting men’s lust” that resulted in rape (Carmody 1992).

We argued that rape and sexual assault were not about sex, but about power and control. From that perspective, rape represented the ultimate operation of a male patriarchal system that benefited all men—whether they committed rape or not. I now see that as a deeply pessimistic view that held out little hope for change, apart from a complete restructuring of society. While some aspects of this restructuring are evident in increased gender equality for women in the public sphere, it is the private sphere of intimate relations that proves so resistant to change.

Over time, we have also realized that the power and control evident in sexual violence has many different forms. An earlier assumption that rape was most frequently committed by strangers was refuted by Diana Russell (1990), in her study on wife rape, and by Mary Koss (1988), who investigated date rape on US college campuses. This enabled change to the law and to policy environments and arguably had considerable effects on wider society. Those effects, however, did not seem to stop sexual assault, or even lessen its occurrence. Sexual assault within marriage, for example, was not made a crime until the early 1980s in many democratic countries. Even so, there are very few charges laid or prosecuted under this legal provision. Indeed, most sexual assaults of any kind are still not reported. Estimates vary, but they are low. In Australia, only 10–20 percent of actual offences result in reports to the police, and the attrition rate is high for those cases that go before the courts (Australian Bureau of Statistics 2004; Jordan 2001; Lievore 2003; Neame and Heenan 2003). In the United States, a 2009 analysis of the US Department of Justice rape crime statistics found that, contrary to media reports, the rate of rapes and the conviction rates for rape in the United States haven’t improved since the 1970s. According to the study, even today, in only roughly 2 percent of rapes reported to police in the United States will a rapist go to jail (Lonsway and Archambault 2012). Some of the reluctance to report may be due to fear of legal proceedings—especially what it means to give evidence in court. However, most researchers and practitioners agree that many women still feel they are responsible, and this inhibits them from reporting the crime.

As the definition of rape widened, researchers began asking women about other forms of subtle coercion—from an unwanted kiss to unwanted sexual intercourse—as a result of verbal pressure. Koss (1988) and Gavey (1991a, 1991b) both found that 50 percent of women reported having some experience on this continuum of sexual victimization. Gavey’s (2005a) study further documented the experiences of women who felt pressured or were coerced directly by partners or their cultural conditioning to accept unwanted sex.

These shifting approaches to sexual assault resulted in prevention education incorporating an understanding of risk as occurring “closer to home.” However, as I discuss in chapter 5, many prevention efforts utilized a risk model that individualized the problem for women. Women are made responsible for learning to manage their own risk of sexual assault. Men are not seen as part of the solution because they are the problem. In this model, the educational spotlight is on stopping unethical behavior. In the process, gender relations are made central. It all seems to make sense on the surface, given the statistics on who mostly perpetrated the violence.

Yet, over time, research indicated it just wasn’t this simple. There is now a substantial body of evidence from the United States and Canada that this approach does not prevent sexual violence (see Carmody and Carrington 2000, for a detailed overview of this research).

In addition, it produces an account where women are doomed to potential victimhood and men to be inherently exploitative. There is no recognition of the diverse ways in which women and men negotiate sexual intimacy based on mutuality and ethics. Not surprisingly then, I believe that we need alternative ways of conceptualizing our primary prevention education in the field of sexual violence.

As part of this rethinking, we need to consider how prevention materials for young people have incorporated risk and fear. Young people are often associated with ideas of risk (Furlong and Cartmel 2007). However, the sexual cultures in which they operate are less well understood. Research in the United Kingdom by Attwood and Smith (2011) among a range of specialists from sexual health, childhood, youth, and media and communication studies identified a number of gaps in their understanding of young people. These included a considerable lack of actual knowledge about young people’s sexual cultures, a need for more qualitative research, and a concern to move beyond young people and danger to a consideration of the ways in which young people can and do have good experiences of sex. This lack of knowledge is strongly evident in the official resources provided to young people. If we listen to the talk about sex, we come away with an overwhelming sense that sex is always dangerous and that young people need to be fearful of it. This, however, is not how they see sex. For them, sex has much more complex relations with going out, dating, forming relationships, and feeling their way. It sometimes seems as though film, television, and much else in popular culture better understands this. This mismatch or “gap,” as Louisa Allen (2005) calls it, between official sexuality talk, popular culture, and what young people say about their experiences has negative effects. Sexuality education is, therefore, seen as irrelevant and out of touch with their concerns.

I remain optimistic in spite of the damning worldwide evidence of sexual and other forms of intimate violence reported by the United Nations (2005), in the United States (Black et al. 2011), and in Australia and other countries (Mitchell et al. 2014). I do not think my optimism is misplaced. As evidence for this, I think we need to reflect on the many women and men who do not resort to violence in their intimate relationships.

We can do better in relation to preventing sexual violence before it occurs. My optimism is underpinned by the possibility of a more comprehensive approach to violence prevention education that places positive sexuality education at its heart. We need to think differently about both sexuality and violence prevention education, and produce links between them that enable more positive prevention results.

In this book, I position prevention education within a sexual ethics framework that values sexual pleasure. It involves social and collective perspectives on how people negotiate sex. It is not used simply to refer to morals and morality. The general purposes of prevention education in this framework are twofold: to support people in constructively achieving their goals in sexual contexts and to lessen the frequency of negative outcomes.

This approach allows us to explore the risks of sexuality, including emotional as well as physical risks, but it does so in relation to the pleasures involved. That is, it acknowledges what the participants bring to sex and the contexts where it occurs. It steps back from prescriptive approaches that primarily tell young people what they should do. Rather, this project involves asking them: “What is it you are concerned about? What knowledge and skills do you need?” It then offers practical ideas and techniques that help them work out their own ethical stance in a multiplicity of contexts. Let me spell out my theoretical rationale a bit more fully.

Conceptual Frameworks

I have worked for more than three decades around a range of strategies to prevent sexual violence. These include law reform; clinical support for survivors of sexual assault; policy reform to improve institutional responses to survivors; and community education to challenge community denial of the trauma and cost of sexual violence to the whole community. This has been matched by academic research and teaching. In 1999, I realized that, despite our best efforts, sexual assault had not diminished and, in some areas, it seemed to have ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Part I   Young People, Sex, and Sexual Assault Prevention
• Part II   Educating about Sexual Ethics
• References
• Index