The headmaster of Eton, one of the most prestigious private schools in the UK, has said that children from the age of nine are in need of “pretty graphic” sex education to combat the growing pressures of the modern world. In Denmark, a leading academic has suggested that teenagers be shown pornography as well as sex-education videos in order to illustrate the differences between adult films and reality.
But what about here in Ireland? The Department of Education’s policy is now 17 years old, and the standard of education on relationships and sex varies widely between schools.
On this evening’s The Right Hook, Shane Coleman talked to the ISPCC’s Aoife Griffin about the needs of our young people and how these are being met.
In the late 1980s, a sex education group named the 2 Spirits Project decided that the best way to get through to Australian teens was with a comic book. With the help of Queensland Health, they launched the world’s first sex-ed superhero, Condoman, whose entire heroics revolved around the perils of not practicing safe sex.
25 years later, the series was relaunched to appeal to a whole new audience, and this time he had a sidekick – Lubelicious.
The book was aimed at the indigenous and Islander populations of Australia, which shows that there is a certain sophistication to Condoman; the series, says Amber Frost of Dangerous Minds, is “aware enough to know that 1) safe sex campaigns need to be tailored to specific communities, especially with regard to race and class, and 2) safe sex campaigns need to start with age groups that are probably not yet having sex. As someone from abstinence-only middle America, it's a little mind-blowing to see such a frank effort to destigmatize youth-based sex education.”
The relaunched title [Dangerous Minds]
The first wave of the relaunch took place in 2013, but it proved so successful that new issues were published, and live appearances of Condoman and Lubelicious are still taking place at Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander events in Queensland today.
[Facebook/Two Spirits QAHC]
You can check out the comics here.
