As part of the DO…RSE for Schools project, we asked young people about their RSE. We were struck by how little they were taught about the emotional aspects of sex and relationships. Where they were taught it was reduced to overly simple key messages.

Overly simple ‘key messages’

Students were given talks on consent, sexuality or self-esteem which amounted to a key ‘take home’ message. Messages such as: ‘just say no’, ‘it’s okay to be gay’, or ‘love yourself before you love someone else’. They dismissed such lessons as having no relevance to them. When you think about it, it’s not a surprise. 

Take a moment to think about this for yourself in private. Think about how you feel about yourself. What affects how you feel about yourself? Are there expectations placed on you around gender and sexuality? What did you learn growing up about relationships. Are some kinds of relationships more valuable to you than others? Why?

If it doesn’t work for you, why should it work for your students?

Think about all your relationships – how do you make them work? How do you meet the needs of other people in your life without neglecting your own? How easy is it for you to say ‘no’ to a partner, friend, colleague, family member? The students we are teaching are often going through much of the same stuff that we are dealing with. Why should it be any simpler for them than it is for us?

If you’re already an RSE practitioner, you might want to come on my new Advanced RSE Training course.

Teaching Holistic RSE

Sex and relationships is also an extremely complicated topic because one aspect can’t be taught in isolation from another. For example we can’t teach ‘just say no’ without also addressing that this relates to how we feel about ourselves. That if we feel bad about ourselves compared to other people we may feel that we aren’t allowed to say no.

If there is a power difference in the relationship, where there is more at stake for us than the other person, we might feel we really can’t say no. If we have little decision making power over our bodies, we might not have experienced what saying no feels like. And that much of the wider societal messages we receive encourage us not to say no, particularly to someone who says they love us. 

A young person in our research summed this up perfectly “They just say ‘just say no’ but sometimes people don’t feel confident to do that.” They were saying to us that ‘emotional’ or ‘relationships’ side of SRE was best delivered when young people were asked to think about things themselves. Simply being told what to think in a lecture isn’t real or relevant for them. 

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The use of facts

However the same is also true for the more factual elements of SRE. Information about sexually transmitted infections (STIs), conception, contraception and the law can be taught much more simply. Information can be conveyed simply and effectively through powerpoint presentations, demonstrations and worksheets. So often the temptation is to stick to these topics – with clear learning outcomes and clear messages. But even here young people say that they learn too much about the ‘what’ and not enough about the ‘how’. 

“It separated it from people and just put it in scientific terms … ”

They might learn what STIs are, the different types, transmission routes, long term effects and treatments. However, they don’t learn as much about how to ask for help, or how to talk to a partner about risks, how to deal with the stigma surrounding STIs or how to negotiate safer sex. They might learn what the law is around sexting a sexual image. But how about how to deal with a partner pestering them for an image. Getting support if an image is shared without consent. How gender and power might result in status for some and stigma for others, or how to reduce the risks of sexting. 

The information is there but students aren’t given the opportunity to explore real life situations, how they can get help, how they can support others or how they can change culture of stigma. If students feel that they are simply being told what to think, or being scared off sex altogether, they will simply switch off. Young people may remember names of STIs, or the legal age for sexting, but how useful is this kind of sex education if they can’t put it into practice?

How Can We Change This?

When we were writing the DO… resources we wanted to address this challenge. RSE is a complicated topic but trying to simplify everything into something that would work for every young person won’t work and never has. 

This approach is also really hard to teach. How do we decide on the key message that will work for most students? How do we get to that point without excluding some people? The challenge of making all this engaging enough. How can we appear confident when we are teaching these key messages when we might be struggling with this stuff ourselves? Reducing SRE to simple messages implies that we find all this simple and have it all sorted and that students don’t. The Tea and Consent video is a perfect example of this. We wanted to get away from teachers feeling they have to be experts in sex and relationships, pretending to know all the answers. It makes teachers feel under confident and students can tell when a teacher doesn’t feel confident talking about SRE. 

How to do engaging RSE

So with DO … we shifted the focus from just imparting information and simple key messages to something more engaging and challenging. However as well as embracing the complexity of sex and relationships, we made it easier to teach. We created a set of lesson plans and supporting resources that don’t require specialist knowledge of sex and relationships but instead rely on the skills that teachers already have. These resources are about facilitating really engaging conversations rather than just talking and not listening.

We made it easier for teachers to make it easier for students to talk to each other about the issues that really matter. They are encouraged to reflect on their own values and the messages they have received about sex, gender, sexuality, themselves, consent, love and safer sex. In order to ask them to think, rather than telling them what to think, we wrote truly engaging lesson plans. All the activities are participatory: students getting involved in pairs or small groups whilst allowing them to get as involved as they want to.

You might also find my Bad Sex Ed Bingo resource useful over at BISH.

Making it about them not us

They get to explore these topics for themselves facilitated by creative and innovative learning methods: creating fictional characters to explore gender, using wordstorms to explore how they feel about themselves, practice handshakes to understand how consent feels, learning about love through diagrams and graphs, card sorts to figure out safer sex, asking some big questions about why people have sex or relationships. The course ends with a unique problem solving lesson. Where students to take part in independent learning exercise where they respond to several ‘problem page’ questions.

It’s a complex topic, but easier to deliver than you think

These activities allow for students to really understand how complex RSE can be. However the lesson plans are not complex. They are clearly laid out and structured so that each lesson builds on the next. Throughout there are detailed instructions on how to run the activities. As well as lots of great questions you can ask – if you really want to open the discussion up with students. There’s nothing quite like facilitating a really engaging lesson on RSE. It can be truly fascinating to hear the insights of young people. The key is to remember that your expertise here is not that of a sex education expert (sexpert). You’re a great teacher delivering really engaging, exciting and challenging lessons. So crack the lessons plans out, pin your ears back and start some really great conversations about sex and relationships.

For resources and support to make great RSE happen in your school download the resources, for free, from here.

The post It’s Simple, Sex and Relationships are Complex appeared first on Bish Training - Sex & Relationships Education.

Don’t over simplify consent

In our research for the DO… RSE for Schools project a young person said about their sex education: “[t]hey just say ‘just say no’ but sometimes people don’t feel confident to do that.” Over simplifying consent to a ‘just say no’ or ‘wait for an enthusiastic yes’ message is not likely to be helpful. Consent is an extremely complicated topic. It relates to how we feel about ourselves and how we relate to others. It is also about what culture tells us what we should and shouldn’t do.

Young people said to us that RSE was best delivered when young people were asked to think about things themselves. Simply being told what to think in a lecture isn’t real or relevant for them. This is because it won’t give them the tools to help them in real life.

Don’t just tell people what consent is but let people practice it

Just giving a legal definition of consent, or showing a brief video, is one way of teaching about consent. However, much more useful would be for people to actually practice consent. If you can bring in experiential learning activities then students can learn: about what makes negotiation difficult. How asking for our needs to be met can be tricky. They can learn how to handle power differences. What it feels like to meet your own and other people’s needs and, exploring the messages we get from society about this.

You could try the handshakes activity which has comprehensive instructions, pro-tips and helpful slides. This is part of the consent lesson but is part of a broader curriculum looking at:

• How we feel about ourselves
• Expectations placed on us around gender
• Relationships and love
• Consent and communication
• Safer sex

Another experiential activity you could try is my ‘Choose Chocolate’ exercise in my Consent Teaching Pack. This is where participants get to practice tuning into what they want and learning how to meet their needs and others.

If you’re already an RSE practitioner, you might want to come on my new Advanced RSE Training course.

Open up conversations exploring the difficulties

In my experience young people (and not so young people) love talking about consent in detail. It can bring up so much around social norms, ethics, politics, gender, power, and structural inequality. Good RSE needs to allow people to reflect on, to consider, and to change or build upon their values or ethics. There’s an example of consent conversations at my website for young people BISH about this. Also there’s an extended version of that is available in my Consent Teaching Pack.

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Don’t just make it about the person saying no

It’s vitally important that we don’t reinforce some of the problematic messages about consent when we teach about consent. We certainly should not be putting the emphasis on people to be saying no. This puts the responsibility on victims of assault and not on perpetrators. Whilst we can say that it should be okay to say no, and to give people some tools to help them do this, we should be spending more time teaching everyone about how to recognise and respect a no. And, importantly how to increase the opportunities for others to say no to us.

Bring in media and messages

You could ask students to critically review famous film clips and ask them to explore how the characters are relating to each other around consent. Maybe also ask students to think about the messages that mainstream and sexually explicit media sends out about consent, choices and agency.

It’s important not to do this as a way of exonerating perpetrators of sexual violence (ie it was looking at porn that made me do it). However we can look at the sources of consent education we have and consider how useful they all are. Media reflects but also reinforces the dominant narratives we have around power, gender, sexuality, relationships, and ourselves. Critiquing this is important because, as academic Ros Gill says, we can’t escape culture. Much of our culture does not encourage consensual practices with each other or with ourselves.

Talk about power

One of my many criticisms of the use of the Tea and Consent video is that it doesn’t really address power differences in relationships. My key point was that if Nigella Lawson made me an awful cup of tea then I would feel that I had to drink all of it because a) what I’m taught about politeness and b) I want her to like me.

As we saw in the recent iteration of #metoo activism, consent and power differences are intertwined. People were made more vulnerable to sexual assaults and rapes because a lot was at stake for them if they didn’t (their careers and livelihoods) and their attackers knew this. This is something that affects all of us, whether we are in Hollywood or not.

We all have different levels of power and privilege because society gives some people more status than others because of their identity (race, disability, gender, sexuality, class, age etc). We can also experience differences in power in a relationship if, for example, one of us is more confident or experienced than another. Because of this, it’s harder for some people to ask for what they want (or what they don’t want) from sex and relationships. This has to be part of what we teach about consent.

What is sex

Make sure that ‘sex’ is not just intercourse but can include a wide range of practices. Even if you teach some really great stuff about consent, it will be undermined if you don’t teach inclusive and holistically about what sex actually is. Sex is about diverse sexual practices that people may or may not enjoy. It’s not just about intercourse or penis in vagina sex. If you teach that that’s what sex is, then as well as excluding everyone in society who can’t have that kind of sex, you are also sending a non-consensual message about what kind of sex is acceptable and expected.

Model it

We can be bringing good consensual practice into the classroom even when we aren’t teaching about consent. We can enshrine these by having a group agreement whenever we do RSE (but why stop at RSE). However we can also bring this in with different teaching methods.

When putting people into small groups we could ask students if they want to be put into groups or whether they choose their own groups. Small groups means that some students can feel more comfortable participating than in larger groups. When asking people for contributions you could ask open questions and not put people on the spot. You can also subtly give people the option not to participate in a lesson, or in an aspect of a lesson, if they might find it uncomfortable. For example in the handshakes lesson, people could be observers of other people shaking hands rather than taking part in handshakes themselves.

Of course, if you want to go there, you could talk about how consensual it is that students have to be in your classroom, or at school at all. What would consensual schooling look like?

It’s not just in the classroom but look at the culture of the school

How can we bring more consent and choice into the fabric of the school, rather than just in the lessons. This involves looking at policy and practice around things like: reports of harassment and bullying; and safety and inclusion. It’s also about creating positive relationships within schools so that there are enough adults with good relationships with students that every student feels they have someone they can talk to.

So why not have a look at DO… today and use the resources in your teaching this year. They are free and top quality, even though I do say so myself. If you would like more or alternative resources about consent, try my Consent Teaching Pack. 

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Tyranny of Tea – societal pressure

The tea video goes straight into the interaction about whether someone wants tea or not. However it would be really useful to first of all point out the tyranny of tea and how it seems to be so essential to our very existence. We all receive messages (particularly in the UK and Ireland) about the importance of tea: ‘we’re a nation of tea drinkers’, ‘let’s sort the problem out over a cup of tea’, the national institution of afternoon tea. Even one of the UK national sports has a break specifically to drink the stuff.

This also plays out with the people around us which: ‘the kettle’s on’, ‘there’s tea in the pot’, ‘we’re all having tea’, ‘I’m having a brew do you want one’, ‘go on have a cup of tea’. It’s presented as such a benevolent, harmless and normal thing that we can feel very abnormal for not wanting tea – or any hot caffeinated drinks at all – which puts us under a lot of pressure to get used to drinking it (even if we really don’t like it).

Same with sex right? Sex is seen as such a benevolent, healthy and normal activity that everyone is expected to do it. To not want sex at all: because someone isn’t interested, or wants sex in a committed relationship, is practicing celibacy, or is asexual is seen as so unusual that people receive tremendous stigma about it.

Tea is for everyone – sex isn’t

However although pretty much everyone is expected to drink tea, and receives status if they do so, it’s not the same for sex. Only some people are seen as being able to have sex (e.g. not disabled and over 16 but under 50) and some people get status for doing it and some stigma. When we factor in all of our different identities (e.g. genders, sexual identities, age, race, class, disability, HIV status, etc) we might find that sometimes we are given more or less status or stigma around our sexuality depending on our oppressions and privileges.

Often this is played out between what men are taught about sex (e.g. lad points, real man, stud, men love sex all the time) and what women are taught (e.g. slut, slag, sket, women are not meant to like it). But think about all the other messages that people hear from different groups and add them all together if this applies. These powerful messages come from everywhere and are played back to us from an early age until now, sometimes consciously and directly but often not. They are very difficult to escape or deal with or process and they can have a huge affect on our sexual decision making and our sense of agency.

If we factor in another person (or people) here then we can see that we may often have more or less power in a sexual encounter – we need to be able to have a sense of this with the people around us, in all encounters, not just sexual. However because of the seeming convergence of sex and relationships (the idea that we ‘must’ have sex if we are in a relationship and that the only time sex is allowed is when we are in a relationship) this also means that there is often a difference in power in relationships too. I’ll reflect on this a bit later on.

What counts as tea – normative scripts

If I ask for ‘a cup of tea’ in the UK I know what I’m going to get: English/Irish breakfast blend with some milk. There’s a very strong script of what counts as tea – anything else is a bit exotic, or specialist, or frankly sometimes just not tea. Maybe you might get asked how strong you like tea (how much milk you want), or how many sugars, but that’s it.

Same with sex right? A huge part of consent is recognising that the choices we make are massively restricted by the messages about what it is that we are allowed to do. Sex is penis in vagina sex: anything else is seen as exotic, specialist or frankly just not sex. This kind of sex is the only game in town and we’re under a lot of pressure to do it even if we don’t want to. And of course if we don’t have the bodies that can do penis in vagina sex then we are excluded altogether.

Not saying no – power in relationships

Like many people I often imagine Nigella Lawson asking if I’d like a cup of tea. I don’t think that I could do anything other than say ‘yes please, I’d love a cup of tea’ even if I didn’t actually want a cup of tea. I don’t think there’s any way I could be cool and say something like:

‘sure, what kind of tea do you have in mind’
‘how are you going to brew it’
‘are you having the same or would you like me to make you something different?’

I’d just nervously agree to the tea because I really really fancy her and just want her to like me (or for her not to dislike me).

I think if the tea arrived and I didn’t like how she brewed it (e.g. she used a tea bag and even put the milk in before taking the tea bag out) I think I would drink the tea anyway. I think I would even pretend it was a really great cup of tea even if I thought it was terrible. I’d probably make sure to drink all of it even if it was a giant seemingly endless mug of tea. I wouldn’t want her to think that I didn’t enjoy it and I’d also feel guilty about not drinking a cup of tea that someone had offered me and spent some time preparing even though I didn’t want it in the first place.

In the tea video there’s nothing about the power of societal and cultural scripts and messages about what counts as tea, but there’s also nothing about the power in interpersonal relationships. Interactions about whether people have sex or not often involve higher stakes than negotiations about a cup of tea and often the stakes can be higher for one person than it is for another.

In my example about me and Nigella, to her offering a cup of tea might be a kind but mundane gesture, to me it would mean something entirely different as it might mean acceptance or interest from a famous person I fancy a lot. Imagine how I would feel if Nigella asked me out on a date!

But enough about Nigella and me (*swoon*), power exists where people know each other too. For example in a long term cohabiting relationship turning down a cup of tea, or asking for a different kind of tea or different kind of drink altogether, or having a cup of tea given to you even if you didn’t ask for one is no big deal. But if we substitute tea for sex here, it can be a huge deal. Also the pressure to have sex in a ‘love’ relationship is huge and often people think that because they are in love they should have sex – whenever their partner wants. Or sometimes the word love can be used to coerce people into sex: ‘but I thought you loved me?’

We can’t step outside of the messages of culture and society but it’s also difficult to step out of the almost inevitable power differences between people and this can have a huge impact on how much agency we feel we have. We can see that this stuff is actually quite complicated. It’s also about far more than just yes or no.

Tea might be yes/no but sex isn’t

One of the biggest problems when we over simplify conversations about consent is when we boil it down to a one time yes or no negotiation. I’ve worked with and listened to many many people (thousands) about consent and sexual encounters and it’s clear to me that we need much more than a yes means yes and no means no understanding of consent. From the student who said: “so if two people have sex and neither of them says yes or no, is it consensual sex?” to the woman who when I asked whether sex was consensual or not she said “yeah I didn’t say no, so it wasn’t rape.” On the one hand of course yes means yes and no means no, and the absence of a no does not mean a yes, but we all need much more than this very simple message to understand how consent feels for us and how to practice it.

The ability to use words to get and give consent is great for people who are confident enough to say ‘would you like to have sex?’ or ‘yes I would like to have sex’. But many people just aren’t able to do that – see above about agency, power and who is allowed to have sex. Even if people were able to do this, that agreement only applies at that fixed moment in time. Tea might be a one off decision resulting in a binary result of having tea/not having tea, but sex isn’t.

Checking in and paying attention

So going back to Nigella. I’d like to think that she’s pretty cool and understands that there is a power dynamic going on and that even though I said ‘yes’ to the tea I might actually be pretending to enjoy it.

So I reckon she might pay really close attention to whether I really wanted the tea: how enthusiastic was I in my response, did I seem happy when she put the mug down, what my facial expressions are when I’m drinking it, am I making noises indicating enjoyment, how quickly I’m drinking it, how much I drank. I think she’d check in with me afterwards too. I’d like to think that at any point if I seemed unhappy she’d offer to make me another drink, or very gently give me permission to leave it, or not make a big thing about not taking it with me when we move into another room.

Maybe you could try this the next time you have a cup of tea with someone?

Sexual consent isn’t a one time yes, no negotiation. It’s a constant series of decisions, negotiations and communications. If someone has clearly and verbally agreed to sex, or whether they are following a script for sex (e.g. kissing, ‘foreplay’, penis in vagina), it’s important to keep paying attention to them and to check in if we’re not sure that they are enjoying it, or at least not not enjoying it. This is where the tea analogy really falls down in my view.

Closes down conversation

Many people have said that it’s not a perfect analogy but at least it opens up the conversation about consent. Mmmm maybe. I think the tone of the blog and the tone of the video are kind of different. The video implies that consent is all very simple: if someone doesn’t want tea don’t give them tea, if someone is asleep they can’t consent to tea, don’t give them tea. In my view the tone of the video is there are smart people who get this and there are stupid people that don’t.

I don’t think so. I think it’s totally possible to understand this view of consent but also to act in a non-consensual way. I think it’s also good to reframe the ‘they’ to a ‘we’ because I think the video creates this idea of an ‘other’ or a ‘them and us’. We are all capable of behaving in consensual and non-consensual ways when it comes to sex, bodily contact and social situations – all of us.

If we’re sleeping over with someone how to check if we can touch each other in the middle of the night. Knowing what to do with our hands when snogging. Not touching people on the dancefloor or at a gig without any communication that that is what they wanted. Hearing other people when they say they don’t want another drink. Respecting people when they want to stay in. Asking if holding hands or hugging is okay. Being able to ask open questions rather than closed ones. Understanding that it’s harder for some people to say what they want for dinner than others. Asking before we touch or hug people.

Why doesn’t this work as a sex education tool? It’s simplistic but it’s also just about knowledge. I think it’s completely possible for someone to remember every word of the video and not behave consensually. Good sex and relationships education is about skills (e.g. communication), values (e.g. understanding power difference) and our own feelings (e.g. what it feels like for someone to really respect what you want). The tea thing isn’t very people centred. If you’re going to run a workshop or a class about consent you need to give people an opportunity to really explore their own actions and how this feels for them. It’s maybe a useful thing to share on social media and say ‘have you seen this?’ but really, has it helped you to understand consent? Has the way you’ve though about consent changed? Have your behaviours changed at all after watching the video?

Folk are tired of just being told what to think. Good SRE is about giving people the space to think critically and a safe space to reflect on their own stuff. This is why I prefer working with an experiential learning method around consent – such as handshakes, which Meg John Barker and I have been working on. Go and check it out, it’s totally free. MJ and I have done this with therapists, teachers, youth workers, academics, young people at school and Uni and even paying members of the general public – it works really well.

If you’re working with over 14s you might want to sign up for free support, resources and lesson plans (written by me and Alice Hoyle with advice and guidance from Meg John) to deliver a unique six week SRE programme which is all about self (and power), what is expected of us, love, consent and reducing risk. Check out DO… it’s all free.

For a post about how consent might feel go here, for how to put that into practice go here,

If you’d like to book a training course with me on consent for up to 16 people go here. Or if you would like me to come and teach it in person go here.

Since I wrote this there have been a couple of really interesting academic articles about this and consent teaching generally.

From Date Rape Jeopardy to (Not) Drinking Tea

Dilemmas of school-based relationships and sexuality education for and about consent

The post “Have You Seen That Tea and Consent Video?” appeared first on Bish Training - Sex & Relationships Education.