Sex education and parents' rights
Valerie Riches
Parents have fundamental human rights in the upbringing of their children . . . 'This principle in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is supported, nominally at least, by the Department of Health which stated last year: 'Services must accordingly reflect the importance of the family dimension in all child health care. . . ' Parents are still held to be legally responsible for their children's physical and moral health and welfare, and for their behaviour; yet there is one area of a child's life in which parents have virtually lost their human right: the sexual health and welfare of their children under the age of 16, the age of consent. Parliament has not ordained that this should be so: what has happened is entirely the consequence of decisions taken inside a government department working with pressure groups in this field with whose aims the officials responsible are plainly in complete sympathy.
In 1974, the Department of Health, after consultation with the Family Planning Association, issued a memorandum of guidance on family planning services. This included a section (section G) on children under the legal age of consent which contained advice from the Medical Defence Union that parents of a child, of whatever age, should not be contacted without the child's permission. This was at complete variance with medical practice in any other area for the treatment of children under the age of 16. For example, parents are required to give written consent for such minor routine matters as immunisation to rubella, regularly offered to young adolescents. But now, parents are not to know if their young adolescent daughter is prescribed 'the pill', a scheduled drug on the Poison's List.
There have been other equally serious consequences. By a fiat of a government department alone, the DHSS memorandum virtually nullified the law of the age of consent, making it unworkable; and it did so at the very time when Home Office Ministers have denied any intention of changing it. (They are, of course, under some pressure from various quarters to do so, including from the so-called paedophiles, some of whom would like it to be abolished, or reduced to the age of four.) While undermining the role of responsible parents, it encouraged irresponsibility in others, and removed from doctors their option to involve the parents if in their professional judgment this would be in the best interests of the child. The memorandum also left young and vulnerable girls unprotected from exploitation from adults and from commercial and ideological interests. To those who preach sex as an end in itself, the memorandum was an obvious charter of the sexual rights of children to free access to state contraceptives and abortion on demand, all entirely possible with parental obstruction conveniently removed.
While it is an abuse of language to describe the provision of contraceptives to children as 'family planning', the DHSS has issued new guidelines to Area Health Authorities drawing attention to the 'need' to provide special family planning services for adolescents. At the same time the Brook Advisory Centres, a charity and publicfunded body, which specialises in providing contraceptives and arranging abortions for the young, openly advocated that the public, particularly parents, should accept adolescent sexual intercourse — 'adolescence' being defined as from the age of 11. This campaign is entitled 'Safe Sex for Teenagers'; a phrase which is tantamount to an encouragement to sexual activity by children and demonstrably inaccurate since no contraceptives are wholly 'safe' or reliable, particularly when practised by young raw recruits. It is too much to expect the emotionally immature and the psychologically unready to absorb the complexities of the use of contraceptives.
There has been a remarkable increase in conceptions in the 16-year-olds and under, from 1000 a year in the Fifties to 13,000 a year in the Seventies; a rise in sexually transmitted diseases in all teenage groups: an increase in adolescent suicides and attempted suicides and a growth of child prostitution and violence in girls. These are symptoms of a profound social malaise which we should not ignore. It is worthy of investigation that these manifestations of teenage distress have increased along with the growth of sex and contraceptive instruction and a plethora of propaganda material directed at the young from many different quarters.
There can surely never have been a generation of adolescents so well informed of the 'facts', yet the contraceptive lobby (sometimes with vested interests in the sale of contraceptives) continues to deplore the widespread 'ignorance' and demands more sex instruction for all children: even eightyear-olds must be taught about the mechanics of contraceptives. There are groups in this linked network of lobbyists which actually seek to get sex education compulsorily integrated into the school curriculum. If this is achieved, parents would have no means whatsoever of withdrawing their children from the indoctrination.
Westward TV recently devoted a programme to justify the need for contraceptive instruction to children from the age of 13 based on a report for the Devon Local Education and Health Authorities. Statistics were quoted in a sea of meaningless jargon but the kernel of the truth lay in the report: 'Yet sexuality has for so long been repressed in the young by parents, teachers and others. . . 'Not a word about educating the young in the many positive health and social advantages of restraint from premature sexual intercourse. And what of the parents? 'Parents should be given an opportunity to discuss the programme in terms of the reason for its introduction . . . ' Yet, paradoxically, when their children obediently carry out the instructions and experiment with their free contraceptives from the clinics, the parents, as a result of a government direction, will not be told.
The extent to which bureaucratic officiousness is capable of riding over the wishes of tax-paying parents working through democratic procedures, has been recently demonstrated in Doncaster and Ipswich. On discovering by chance that the Doncaster Area Health Authority had set up an adolescent sex clinic based on the `no parents' policy of the Department of Health, a group of parents arranged for the views of two coal-mining villages under the Doncaster Metropolitan Borough Council to be surveyed. Just over 2,000 people completed the form: 96 per cent of those people approached were opposed to children being given contraceptives without parental consent. This petition and others, a resolution and questions were addressed to the Area Health Authority. All were ignored.
The Ipswich Community Health Council recommended to the Suffolk Area Health Authority that written permission should be obtained from parents. A heavy-handed letter came post-haste from the Family Planning Association: ' . . . the Association would take a very grave view of any variation from the guidelines set down in the DHSS Family Planning Service Memorandum . . . and we would do anything in our power to see that these guidelines are adhered to in every respect.' The Area Health Authority quashed the Community Health Council's decision.
Parents should make no mistake about it; the lobby for 'Safe Sex for Teenagers', the sort of sex education it promotes and section G of the DHSS Family Planning Service Memorandum must be resisted if their children are to be protected. This lobby, once described in the Spectator as'. . . one of the most savagely damaging lobbies a society has ever had to confront', is promoting an ideology which is unrelated to any real understanding of human need and of the social forces which combine to create a civilised society. Unchecked, it will bring about an increase in adolescent distress and disaster to the role of parents, the family and to society itself. Parents must reassert themselves. It is their job, their fundamental human right, to be responsible for the care, moral education and guidance of their children, not the 'experts'.
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