Children and sexuality education: kept on a strictly 'need to know' basis?

Currently, we teach primary school children about drug and alcohol addiction under the banner of "Life Education". This doesn't seem to scare people at all. Yet the chances of a ten-year-old being exposed to heroin usage is far less than the chances of a ten-year-old being exposed to some kind of sexual stimulus - be it deliberate or peripheral. Yet many of us prefer to think that children wear invisible blinkers and their erogenous zones are completely numb - until well after the onset of puberty.

Why are people so afraid to talk to children about something so important - at an age when they are probably the most open and receptive, as they'll be in their entire lives? Why wait till they are teenagers - when, for many families, communication between parent and child begins to break down.

Surely anyone who can't remember their childhood, but has ever experienced intense sexual arousal can vouch for its intoxicating, compelling properties and the incumbent vulnerability that goes with it. Consider then, the concentrated effect this would have on the young and innocent - for whom the feelings are completely unknown and uncontrollable.

Currently, the language that sex educators use in connection with sexual abuse is "uncomfortable" - i.e: Children are told "if someone touches you in a way that makes you uncomfortable, tell them to stop or inform an adult". This description doesn't quite cut it, for the child who has been unwittingly molested from a very young age, by a trusted family friend. This child will most likely have grown to find the experience a pleasurable, secret game - and has been persuaded or threatened not to talk about it to anyone.

This is real life, and sexuality education is no time to be squeamish. Language needs to be precise and direct. Sure, it seems as though a child's innocence is at stake but it's really their ignorance that is being extinguished. Innocence is truly only lost when trust is violated.

Yet it is that very word: "innocence" which provided the tag for the 60 Minutes story - Tara Brown reminded us of the fleetingness and preciousness of a child's innocence and how we should seek to preserve it. Paying lip service again to the highly subscribed theory that learning everything there is to know about sex is the surest way to sabotage purity of heart.

Which brings us back to what many viewers would have seen as a defining and shocking component of the story. Our young friend with his pudendal dilemma - The Clitoris Kid.

No doubt many a viewer would have mistaken the child's exasperation to be a direct result of their own preconceived notions of the "delicate and embarrassing" nature of his quest - viewing the situation from their own paradigm of embarrassment at the utterance of such a naughty word.

However, it was abundantly clear that this exercise had been laid out as an educational game, and being a typically competitive young male - he was just deadly keen for his "team" to win. His innocence was certainly still palpable and his ardency, adorable.

Nonetheless, some parents would just plain horrified by the concept of any child so boldly addressing genitals by their correct clinical names.

News flash: learning where the clitoris belongs isn't learning about sex - it's discovering anatomy. Learning about fallopian tubes isn't learning about sex either - that's biology. The whole reproductive scenario (ie: puberty, conception, contraception and childbirth) which forms the basis of current primary school sex education methods, should be taught in school under the big umbrella that is "Science". This would free up sexuality educators to concentrate on the more relevant stuff.

Sexuality - particular female sexuality, is a multi-faceted and highly misunderstood beast, which takes more than an hour-long sex-education seminar to understand - yet we've been thinking for years that this is all it takes to inform young people how to deal with their sexuality.