Two 13-year-old girls are leading a charge to include consent in Ontario’s forthcoming sex-ed curriculum.
Tessa Hill and Lia Valente are both grade 8 students at a Toronto public school and they want to ensure that when they and their classmates take sex ed (it’s sort of started for them but the curriculum heats up in grade 9) it includes discussions of consent. A petition they posted to Change.Org has gone from just over 400 to well over 1,500 signatures and counting since Tuesday morning.
Ontario education minister Liz Sandals announced last fall the province intends to unveil a new health and physical education curriculum (government-speak for sex ed) this February. The guidelines haven’t been fully updated since 1999. In 2010, then-premier Dalton McGuinty pulled-back on plans to update the curriculum when now-Premier Kathleen Wynne was education minister.
Now that Wynne has a majority, she seems intent on finally rolling out those changes, which stirred controversy for introducing proper anatomical names and notions of same-sex families to kids in early elementary years.
For Hill and Valente, the changes and the inclusion of consent in those reforms is not only important to them, but to generations to come. They first started exploring the issue of consent as part of a school project on a social justice issue. They chose “rape culture,” and Hill said they learned through their research, “in order to end rape culture, we have to create a consent culture.”
“The key to creating that is education,” Valente said. She said schools focus on abstinence and sexually transmitted infections, but not what consent looks and sounds like.
Education Minister Liz Sandals looks on as Premier Kathleen Wynne reads to kids in an Ontario classroom. The pair have promised to include consent in their new sex ed curriculum. (Chris Young/Canadian Press) []
Wynne, as part of a sweeping set of proposals to combat sexual violence in Ontario, has asked Sandals to include consent in the new curriculum. To what extent won’t be known until it’s revealed, and given the controversy and backlash last time around, who knows how far the province will be willing to go.
The two teens petitioning the premier to keep her word have a few suggestions.
Hill suggested schools should “teach not just how to put on a condom but what safe, healthy, consensual relations look like and what consensual sex sounds like.”
Teens also need to learn silence isn’t consent; drunk or otherwise intoxicated people can’t necessarily consent ; having sex without consent is not sex, it’s a crime punishable under the Criminal Code, Hill said.
Valente described consent as “two people actively engaged, enthusiastic ‘yes please’ from both sides.”
They have a nuanced understandings of the issue, and not just for 13-year-olds. They both say not everyone has parents that discuss such issues or go to a more alternative school like theirs.
“There are parents that will teach this but it’s not guaranteed every family will. It is guaranteed everyone will go to school, Valente said.
“School is there to teach life skills,” Hill said, “and that includes sex ed.”
Source:: canada.com
