Paris, September 04: A set of UN sex education guidelines for children are drawing fire from conservative groups in the US and around the world for being explicit and graphic for young children and damaging to cultures and religions.
“If you ever have a situation where kids need to be taught earlier than their adolescence, this is not the way to do it,” Colin Mason of the Population Research Institute, a Virginia-based anti-abortion organization, told the New York Times on Thursday, September 3.
The guidelines, prepared by the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) over the past two years, recommend that governments, education ministries and school systems provide students with more sex education at an early age.
For example, the guidelines suggest that teachers begin discussing masturbation with children aged 5, with a more extensive discussion for those between 9 and 12.
“It’s very graphic and encourages practices like masturbation, which conservative Christians and others feel are wrong,” insisted Mason.
Michelle Turner, founder of the Maryland-based Citizens for a Responsible Curriculum, says kids should be learning the proper name of certain parts of their bodies but “certainly not about masturbation.”
“I’m really concerned about what they want to teach 5- to 8-year-olds.”
Insensitive
The document, to be distributed to school systems and teachers around the world, is also denounced as being too broad to fit all cultures
Conservative groups criticized recommending discussions about “the right to and access to safe abortion” and post-abortion care with children aging 12 to 15.
“I have concerns about their position on abortion and the way they want to present it to youth,” Turner said.
Others slammed recommending discussions about homosexuality and describing sexual abstinence as “only one of a range of choices available to young people” to prevent disease and unwanted pregnancy.
“Where are parents’ rights?” fumes Turner.
“It’s not up to the government to teach these things.”
Mason, of the anti-abortion organization, agrees that the diversity of views around the world on issues like abortion and homosexuality renders any universal approach culturally insensitive.
“We think it’s a kind of one-size-fits-all approach that’s damaging to cultures, religions and to children.”
The criticism has forced the UNESCO to remove the June draft of the guidelines from its Web site, and delay the release of the final document until later this year.
Criticism has also caused one of the key participating and donor agencies, the United Nations Population Fund, to pull back from the project and ask that its name be edited out of the published material.
-Agencies