Written by Parker O’Neill, 16, Maryland
Growing up in Maryland, one of the most prominent memories from middle school is the dreaded sexual education classes we had all the way up to eighth grade. Three years’ worth of PowerPoints reviewing the same information time and time again, all providing the same takeaway: Don’t have sex prior to marriage.
They taught us the bare minimum pertaining to contraception and used primarily scare tactics when discussing reproductive health. My main issue surrounding my state’s curriculum is that consent was one of the few topics we simply brushed over. We spent more time staring at penis diagrams than discussing the lesson everyone needs to understand prior to having sex. The extent of our learning was surrounding “no means no,” but I, along with my classmates, never learned the manifestations of what lacking consent looked like. Prior to March of 2018, Maryland students were never required to learn about it.
The American sexual education curriculum is largely based on abstinence, with 24 states currently using it as a building block for their lessons. The teaching of abstinence in health classes mainly stems from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services donating to organizations promoting the concept. These donations completely obliterated the Teen Pregnancy Prevention Program’s education on healthy relationships, contraception, and dating violence. Not only did teen pregnancy rates increase, but rape rates did too.
Only ten states nationwide and D.C. mention consent in their sexual education curriculums. Alaska, which has no mandatory sex ed courses in schools, has the highest rate of reported sexual assaults per 100,000 people. New Jersey, on the other hand, has a very extensive teaching program. Not only does it inform students about consent, but also healthy relationships. New Jersey also has the lowest rate of reported rapes in the nation.
By implementing nationwide sexual education curriculums that go in-depth into consent, as well as promote sex-positivity, we can lower nationwide sexual assault rates in our country, hopefully reducing the damaging effects that rape culture has on men and women.