NYT Story on UN Sex-Ed Guidelines, Several Weird Things

This little story is weirder than it seems, and on the face of it it seems pretty weird. The New York Times had an article this week about new sex-ed guidelines issued by the United Nations. Here's how it starts:

PARIS — A set of proposed international sex education guidelines aimed at reducing H.I.V. infections among young people has provoked criticism from conservative groups that say the program would be too explicit for young children and promote access to legal abortion as a right.

The guidelines, scheduled to be released by Unesco in a new draft next week, would be distributed to education ministries, school systems and teachers around the world to help guide teachers in what to teach young people about their bodies, sex, relationships and sexually transmitted diseases. They would address four different age groups.

“In the absence of a vaccine for AIDS, education is the only vaccine we have,” said Mark Richmond, Unesco’s global coordinator for H.I.V. and AIDS and the director of the division that coordinates educational priorities. “Only 40 percent of young people aged 15 to 24 have accurate knowledge” of how the disease is transmitted, he said, even though that age group “accounts for 45 percent of all new cases.” Sex Ed Guide Generates Opposition

I had seen a summary of these sex-ed guidelines on another site, and they are pretty controversial sounding. I even flipped through the report, not reading but just seeing what it was, I figured I'd come back to it. The UN recommends pretty explicit information for young children regarding sexual function. For instance, according to THIS blog report, the 5-8 year old category includes learning about:

• Private body parts that can feel pleasure when touched by oneself
  
• Basic information regarding conception, fertilization, pregnancy and childbirth
  
• The natural exploration of one’s own body
  
• Masturbation: the touching and rubbing one’s genitals
  
• Cultural and religious messages regarding sex, gender and sexuality
  
• Gender roles, gender inequality and gender-based violence
  
• Consensual sexual activity and sexual abuse
  
• Male and female sexual organs
  
• Sexual diversity
  
• HIV/AIDS and sexually transmitted infections

Just to give you an idea. Not everybody would agree about the appropriateness of these topics for kids that young, let's say. But whatever, it opens the subject up for debate. Why wouldn't you teach eight-year-olds that some parts of your body feel good when you touch them? It is an undisputed truth, and everybody knows it, what's so terrible about saying it out loud? See what I mean? There are things to talk about here.

Now here's the first weird thing. The link in the NYT article, which I included in the blockquote above, goes to some 2008 report from a 2007 conference, a document titled Review of Sex, Relationships and HIV Education in Schools. That isn't new, and it does not contain guidelines, it is a review of sex-ed education, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa. It is clearly the wrong document.

Here's the second weird thing. I went back to read the original, and the UN has taken their document offline. It was HERE, and it was more than a hundred pages long. The current document at that link is one page long, with text covering the title that says, "A new version will be available soon."

So it sounds like they are taking the criticism very, very seriously.

More from the Times:

But the conservative criticism has already 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, United Nations officials said.

A Population Fund official, reached in New York, said Tuesday that the fund wanted changes to the text. “Discussions are ongoing to make the publication more effective and adaptable by countries, so it may better serve countries as guidelines for use in national educational systems,” the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity because of the delicacy of the matter.

A draft issued in June has been attacked by conservative and religious groups, mainly in the United States, for recommending discussions of homosexuality, describing sexual abstinence as “only one of a range of choices available to young people” to prevent disease and unwanted pregnancy, and suggesting a discussion of masturbation with children as young as 5.

We are familiar with that way of wording things, "children as young as 5." The 5-to-8 category gets some information, so they say the five-year-olds get it. The construction casts doubt on the author of this piece, Steven Erlanger, and alerts you to other signs of bias in the article. An objective author would have said that children would have the knowledge "by the age of eight." But the Times chose to go with shocking rather than accurate. Look, HERE is an article on a conservative web site titled "United Nations Plan: Teach Masturbation to 5-Year-Olds." See how clever that is? The New York Times should be better than that.

Suspicion having been raised, I wonder what exactly in the recommendations the Population Fund objected to -- there is no reason to believe they objected to the imparting of accurate information at a surprisingly early age, they may have objected to something else. But listen, we're talking about organizations that generate paperwork by the ton, there's not much of a chance I'm going to Google around and find out what this group objected to. That means the author gets away with implying that the United Nations Population Fund sides with puritanical conservatives in this matter.

Skipping down...

The barrage of criticism has put Unesco, the United Nations agency charged with advancing education and culture worldwide, on the defensive. The agency has removed the June draft of the guidelines from its Web site, and delayed the release of the final document.

“Unfortunately, the way the guidelines have been presented by certain media has provoked some fairly aggressive reactions, mainly in the form of virulent comment on conservative American Web sites, but also via some very nasty e-mails directed at the two co-authors as well as certain Unesco staff,” said Sue Williams, the spokeswoman for the agency, which is based in Paris.

Okay, that explains why the document I was reading a couple of days ago is gone now. It doesn't explain why the Times links to a random 2008 report though.

Man, I wish I'd saved that thing.

Then weird thing number three:

The guidelines suggest, for example, that teachers begin discussing masturbation with children ages 5 to 8, with a more extensive discussion for those ages 9 to 12.

Michelle Turner, founder of the Maryland-based Citizens for a Responsible Curriculum, says children that age 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, and I have concerns about their position on abortion and the way they want to present it to youth,” she said. “Where are parents’ rights? It’s not up to the government to teach these things.”

Here is an international organization issuing guidelines to be used all around the world, and the reporter calls up Michelle Turner of Montgomery County's Citizens for Responsible Whatever to ask her what she thinks about it?

That is some thorough reporting.

Not to be a spoilsport or anything, there is nothing here about "the government," this is a United Nations report. I understand that conservative people might not want their children to find out that touching certain body parts is pleasurable, but this report is not a mandate, not "the government," it affects "parents' rights" in no way.

I think of our controversies here as local, sometimes forgetting the media attention we have gotten. It is possible that Michelle Turner, having championed the failed effort to undermine our county school district's intention to teach students about contraception and sexual orientation, is, after all is said and done, a nationally recognized expert on such matters. I would say that the techniques used by the CRC in fighting sensible sex-ed were the precursors of the kinds of "death panel" and "euthanize grandma" techniques we see now being implemented at the national level, so maybe our little fishbowl is a bigger deal than we realize sometimes. Maybe Michelle Turner's opinion matters to somebody.

Oh, but here's one of those nutty liberals who wrote this recommendations document:

But one of the guidelines’ authors, Nanette Ecker, former director of international education and training at the Sexuality Information and Education Council of the United States, said that given the extent of sexual abuse, unplanned pregnancies and sexually transmitted diseases, sex education has to start early in order to “provide young people with the specific information and skills they need to navigate safely from childhood to adulthood.”

Why, I never! Those liberals and their wild ideas!

One more important aspect of this:

“The document is not a curriculum,” Mr. Richmond said. “It focuses on the why and what issues that require attention in strategies to introduce or strengthen sexuality education.”

The US has traditionally ignored UN recommendations about everything, and I am pretty sure these guidelines would never in a million years affect any decision made by any school board or schoolteacher. But this is a polarizing topic, and knee-jerk conservatives know what their opinion is as soon as they see the title of the document, it's not like they have to read it to know they're against it.