Welcome back for another edition of our Guest Blogger series. This week our guest blogger is Hannah Stewart. She is an educator and also works with young people and body image. She writes here about the importance of sexuality education in relation to fostering positive body image and the impacts of the media and pornography.
The UK’s Sex and Relationship Education (SRE) programme in the UK is finally getting some long overdue attention. Not only will SRE be compulsory from Reception from September 2019, but the original 2000 curriculum has been branded “outdated”1 by Education Secretary Justine Greening and a new one is being developed. But what will the new curriculum cover?
SRE in primary schools currently avoids the explicit sexual and reproductive aspects of the topic, instead focusing on building healthy relationships, bullying, and self-esteem. Education on reproduction, sexuality, and sexual health is introduced from the beginning of secondary school, alongside other elements of the SRE curriculum, which overall aims to “help and support young people through their physical, emotional, and moral development”2.
One area of the current SRE curriculum that is severely lacking is body image. Our perception of our bodies is influenced by external factors from a young age, however schools seem reluctant to address this from a sex education perspective. Although primary school PSHE lessons promote a biological awareness of the body and aim to teach students about the physical changes of puberty “before they experience [them]” 2, there is minimal discussion of how students personally perceive and feel about their bodies until they are 14 years old. Even at this stage, it is covered from a mental health perspective in PSHE lessons and completely separate from SRE.
At a time where adolescents are beginning to realise and explore the sexual capacity of their bodies, we cannot ignore the impact body image will have on sexual behaviour, experience, and associated feelings. General levels of self-esteem affect young people’s (both male and female) sexual behaviour and ability to assert their sexual needs, reject sexual demands, and effectively use condoms. Body image is undeniably one of the many variables that in turn influence general self-esteem, however this influence is likely to be more significant in teenagers for whom ‘image is everything’.
Although the specific area of body image and adolescent sexual activity is arguably under-researched, available evidence indicates a link. One particular American study indicated a correlation between high school girls’ perception of their weight and a variety of sexual behaviour, including condom use and number of sexual partners. These findings are both significant and worrying, as it becomes evident that body image is not only affecting young people’s emotional wellbeing, but their sexual health.
It is impossible to approach the new SRE curriculum without acknowledging the thorny issue of pornography. In the 18 years since the curriculum was first developed, exposure to porn has become a rite of passage and even part of everyday life for the majority of young people. BBC3’s 2014 documentary ‘Porn: What’s the Harm?’ revealed the shocking statistic that over half of UK children will have seen hardcore pornography before secondary school, with children as young as 8 years old accessing porn online. Studies reveal that pornography now controls a third of the internet, attracting more visitors than Netflix, Amazon, and Twitter combined.
With its ever-growing presence, today’s ‘porn culture’ primes children for unhealthy and distorted views of sexual norms in all aspects, from relationships to sexual health. This has become even more insidious with the rise of ‘home movie’ style porn and celebrity sex tapes, as the boundaries between porn and reality become increasingly blurred. UK charity Safety Net identifies negative body image as one of the damaging consequences of pornography on young people and there is an increasing amount of research to support this, reflecting how porn is influencing young people to harshly judge their own bodies against those they see in porn.
Although our bodies are more than the sum of their parts, it is important to acknowledge some of those parts. It is commonly accepted that body image in general influences mental health and self-esteem; however the specific influence of genital body image is almost totally ignored in the current SRE curriculum despite evidence that it has a significant impact – for example, many young women now believe that ‘improving’ their genitals through hair removal (yet another trend strongly influenced by pornography) will improve both how they feel personally and are perceived by others. Despite being sold the basic ‘all shapes and sizes, everyone is normal’ mantra in SRE, there is little opportunity for discussion or exposure to real-life genitals, and so young people look solely to pornography to identify what is ‘normal’. As with all filmed entertainment, the images in porn represent a limited minority of the real-life population, however this doesn’t stop them influencing how young people (both male and female) feel about and view their own genitals and body image in general. In the words of Vanessa Rogers – “If we want young people to feel body confident and aspire to healthy, positive relationships, why are we leaving it to pornography to do so much of the teaching?”3.
To ignore the importance of body image when educating students about sexual health and self-efficacy is at best, naïve and at worst, dangerous. Hopefully the new curriculum will acknowledge the crucial role that body image plays in sexual health and take responsibility for creating a multi-faceted approach to the sex education programme that will enable schools to truly “help and support young people through their physical, emotional, and moral development”1.
References:
1’Sex Education to be compulsory in England’s schools’, Katherine Sellgren for BBC News, March 2017.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-39116783
‘Supporting your child’s sex education’, BBC Schools, 2015.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/schools/parents/sex_education_support/
2 Sex and relationship education guidance, July 2000, DfEE 0116/2000. https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/sex-and-relationship-education
Akers et al. (2009) “Exploring the Relationship Among Weight, Race, and Sexual Behaviors Among Girls”, Pediatrics, 124.5.
Rosenthal, Moore & Flynn. (1991). Adolescent self-efficacy, self-esteem and sexual risk-taking. Journal of Community & Applied Social Psychology, 1(2), pp. 77-88.
Shrier, Harris, Sternberg & Beardslee (2001). Associations of Depression, Self-Esteem, and Substance Use with Sexual Risk among Adolescents. Preventive Medicine, 33(3), pp. 179-189.
3‘Body Image: Another Good Reason To Talk About Porn’, Vanessa Rogers, September 2017. http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/vanessa-rogers/body-image-another-good-r_b_18006056.html
‘Activist Speaks About the Negative Effects of Porn on Body Image, Relationships’, Meg Dolan on Gail Dines, October 2016.
http://bcheights.com/2016/10/19/activist-speaks-about-the-negative-effects-of-porn-on-body-image-relationships/
Cranney, S. (2015). Internet Pornography Use and Sexual Body Image in a Dutch Sample. Int J Sex Health, 27(3), 316-323.
Smolak, L. & Murnen, S. (2011). Gender, self-objectification and pubic hair removal. Sex Roles, 65, 506-517.