Hello everyone and welcome to the Pearl Forte blog and podcast
I was asked by a psychiatrist in Amman to give a Sex Education talk to an all-boys school, I was very excited at first but then when the thought really sank in I wondered what I would tell a bunch of 15-year olds about sexuality… the talk never happened but it did get me wondering if I had a chance to talk to teenagers what would I talk about?
I’d talk about consent… but the problem with this topic is that it shouldn’t be introduced to them by me…. consent and conversations around consent need to be spoken about at a very early age to both girls and boys at home…. It empowers them, it gives them rights and strengthens their voice to speak… we have difficulty in our culture talking about sex at an older age so how do we begin talking about consent to kids? ….Where do we begin?
First of all let me begin by saying that Consent doesn’t have to be taught from a sexual perspective, it can be taught by allowing the children to choose who wants to bathe them, who wants to help them get dressed …and giving them the option to hug their relatives…instead of forcing them and expecting them to be close to individuals they don’t feel good being near
We are so governed by “3eib” that we are not given the option to decline a hug and a kiss by people we are not comfortable with at a young age or at any age…. By giving kids a choice we teach them that they have options and we teach them to think and feel for themselves … and this comes before sex education… think about it… consent isn’t just about sex, its about speaking your truth, its about communication, its teaching boundaries and expressing what feels right to you… when we learn to talk about the small stuff comfortably we will have the courage to speak about the big stuff.
Our system has skipped the importance of:
1- teaching children what consent is
2- giving individuals from a young age their rights (consent is a right, its a basic human right)
3- educating and raising awareness that consent can’t be taken for granted; if consent is given it can be withdrawn at any point in time without questions asked….and the request must be respected and honored.
I have noticed that women today find consent courageous… and that’s another thing… courage.
Why is courage so important? Because we are not taught to say NO… and the topic of sexuality is a huge taboo, we are not familiar with it… it creates a fear for victims to speak about assault, some of the reasons why individuals (of both genders) refuse to speak about sexual assault is fear of no one believing them… fear of being blamed for it… and worst of all fear of being punished for it… many sexual assaults happen from people we know which makes speaking about it harder.
The more we educate children and the older generation about consent and normalizing basic conversations such as the anatomy of girls and boys, the more comfortable individuals become …and what we end up doing is strengthening their voice.
When we talk about consent, we need to also include accountability, accountability means responsibility… we are responsible for what we say and do… and the other people involved are also responsible for what they say and do; if someone gives consent and changes their mind, they have the right to withdraw the consent and take it back… no questions asked..it is our responsibility to speak to our truth…and it is the responsibility of the other individual involved to respect that truth…
Sometimes all it takes is one conversation to empower an individual and gear them with knowledge, so start with your children by reading books or YouTube the best ways to introduce the topic of consent to them… the solutions are simple but sometimes we choose to complicate them because we are too comfortable playing by the rules of society. We need to cut that chord, there is nothing that goes against culture when you teach children what their body parts mean, what is violation and the importance of their truth, if anything it is “Jahel” when we don’t..
Podcast link: https://open.spotify.com/episode/11skc8xeG1hknvqzJaDsWQ?si=ojMT_zfmTYumFzFWRh0L2w