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Breaking down the taboos

By Barbara Biggs - posted Wednesday, 2 May 2007


At the World Association of Sexual Health (WAS) Conference in Sydney recently, as an Australian, I was proud to see a Curtin University Sexology Course awarded the highest honour, a Gold Award, by this international community of sex researchers and practitioners.

After the award ceremony, I spoke with the Perth program leader, Professor Gareth Merriman, who told me it’s been an uphill battle to overcome social and cultural norms.

He cited a recent experience where he organised a lunchtime theatre production of The Vagina Monologues, only to have office staff censor the staff email.

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The University Chancellor was not amused and in turn censured her staff. She felt the production was important and wanted to attend.

It’s heartening to see that such a progressive course is attracting overseas students who can’t find such quality education training in their own countries.

I also met with one of the many overseas students of the course, who told me sex was an off-limits topic in her US home despite sexual images abounding - on playing cards, in posters and in semi-pornographic movies shown in her home.

The only time she asked about sex, she was told she’d find out about that when she got married.

When her boyfriend moved into her parent’s home with her when she was 17, nobody commented, asked her about contraception, or discussed the fact that they slept in the same room.

"That’s what motivated me to study sex education," said the now 30-year-old.

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“All my relationship choices were affected by this double standard, in-the-dark approach. Somehow I picked up that it was my job to sexually please men which messed me around for a long time. I searched the Internet to find a course that isn’t afraid to tell it how it is. I finally found it in Perth.”

But this openness is not across the board in Australia.

When a protective behaviours book, Everyone’s Got a Bottom, was published this month, for three to eight-year-olds, ABC Learning Centres around the country banned it because the word vulva had been used in the text.

Convenor of the project, Holly Brennan, from Queensland Family Planning Association and also presenting at the WAS conference, said that a vulva is a part of the body like a penis or nose. And it’s impossible to teach kids that certain body parts are private and not to be touched without their consent if you can’t tell them what those body parts are.

And evidence from research by Adelaide Professor Freda Briggs, also speaking at the conference and who wrote the foreword to the book, revealed children feel they cannot report "rude" behaviour because it means using "rude" words that could get them into trouble.

Dr Merriman says since comprehensive sex education has been introduced to primary schools in Finland, the average age of sexual initiation has risen from 14 to 17.

His course aims to educate educators and those who deal with protective behaviours and sexual and intimacy problems in their professions.

To this end, he regularly has sex workers, survivors of child sexual abuse and others with direct experience of what the courses teach, to address students. The units are electives for undergraduate students of various courses.

I’d advocate that some units be compulsory for certain disciplines such as psychologists, social workers, teachers, police, law students, youth workers and more.

I have a friend who is about to graduate as a psychologist. She has not studied a single unit on sexuality, child sexual abuse and/or dysfunctions or any clinically-based treatment techniques in her four-year course.

Psychology courses are taught by professors with expertise in research despite the fact that the vast majority of students will never undertake research and will, instead, work in a clinical practice.

We should all be concerned about this. One day a research-trained psychologist or social worker could be investigating or treating your family.

Research shows that 80 per cent of clients of social workers and psychologists will be victims of child sexual abuse. They will be either children at the time of consultation or adults suffering the long term consequences of abuse, such as depression, alcohol or drug addiction, low self-esteem, dysfunctional sex lives or relationships, other mental illnesses, or inter-generational abuse patterns.

So, Australians should thank our stars for ground-breaking courses such as the Sexology one at Curtin University.

As an Eastern state resident, I can only hope that this course will be exported to every major Australian city and be emulated and made compulsory for all undergraduates whose job it will be to deal with children and survivors of abuse.

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About the Author

Barbara Biggs is a former journalist and author of a two-part autobiography, In Moral Danger and The Road Home, launched in May 2004 by Peter Hollingworth and Chat Room in 2006. Her latest book is Sex and Money: How to Get More. Barbara is convenor of the National Council for Children Post-Separation, www.nccps.org.

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