Students are not being taught enough about the impact of pornography and dangerous relationships, even as the threat of online misogyny increases, according to a survey.
Three years after the government introduced relationships and sex education (RSE), the survey reveals that young people feel they have seen no improvement in the quality of sex education they receive, and current teaching fails to tackle modern harms.
Lucy Emmerson, the director of the Sex Education Forum, an umbrella body RSE charity, said the government had failed to deliver on promised national investment and training and there was an urgent need to listen to young people who were not getting the information they needed for healthy sexual relationships.
She said “enormous progress” had been made in introducing mandatory sex education into schools, but the research, carried out for the forum by Censuswide among 1,002 students in England, showed young people did not think they were getting the lessons they needed.
Of the 16- to 17-year-olds surveyed, 58% thought the issue of power imbalances in relationships was being either completely missed or not taught sufficiently, with the same percentage thinking this was also the case for pornography.
More than half (54%) said teaching about healthy relationships, including online relationships, was missing or not good enough, and 55% thought they were not taught enough about attitudes and behaviour of boys and men towards women and girls.
Research by the children’s commissioner for England revealed earlier this year that one in 10 children had watched pornography by the time they are nine years old.
Four out of five (79%) of those surveyed have seen pornography involving violence by the age of 18, while one in three young people had actively looked for depictions of sexual violence such as physical aggression, coercion and degradation.
“The urgency of providing that education to young people just couldn’t be clearer,” said Emmerson. She said the charity was hearing “alarming reports” about the appeal of misogyny to some young men as well as widespread access to pornography among children.
“As the years go by, seeing violent sexual acts in pornography is having a knock-on effect on their own behaviour,” she said. “And yet we know from the research evidence, that relationship and sex education will reduce sexual violence. So we can’t wait.”
Research from the Sex Education Forum suggests sex education works – and that children who receive good RSE are more likely to report abuse, delay having sex, have consensual sex, use contraception and have fewer unplanned pregnancies.
“We’ve got the research, we’ve got the evidence, we’ve got the policies. We have to make sure they’re happening in the classrooms, and that teachers have the support they need to be able to do that,” said Emmerson.
The government has promised to review its mandatory guidance on relationships, sex and health education in 2023. Emmerson said the government needed to stick to its promise of funding better sex education.
In 2019 the schools minister Nick Gibb said £6m had been allocated to “deliver high quality teaching of relationships education, relationships and sex education and health education”, but an answer to a written question by the Labour MP Sarah Champion in February revealed that only £3.2m has been spent.
A government spokesperson said reference to £6m of investment was based on the estimated maximum costs for a package of support. The government would publish further guidance this year on how to teach about sexual harassment, sexual violence and violence against women and girls, while the online safety bill would make children safer, they added.
“All children deserve to grow up in a safe environment, which is why we have made relationships, sex and health education a compulsory part of the school curriculum and invested in support materials to help schools teach these issues well,” they said.
Andrea Simon, the director of the End Violence Against Women coalition, said its recent research showed that 80% of girls thought schools needed to do more to support young people’s sex and relationships education, and to tackle sexual harassment in schools.
“Schools are not equipped with the training and resources to deliver quality relationships and sex education, even while they have been left to clean up the mess created by tech companies profiting from content by misogynistic influencers like Andrew Tate,” she said.
