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Sex education should be a class act (Border Mail, opinion)
20 December 2007
The Grim Reaper was a shocking but most necessary guest in our living rooms when the HIV/AIDS awareness campaign was launched 20 years ago.
The TV commercial touched a nerve. Once seen it was never forgotten – terrified people of all ages depicted as skittles, knocked down by a gruesome figure with a scythe and a bowling ball.
It was a wake up call. It was supposed to be. And we should all be just as much awake to the danger of HIV/AIDS today. But are we? Or have some of us become somewhat complacent and sleepy in the belief that the issue has all but gone away - or belongs only in the lives of gay men and drug users?
Tomorrow is World Aids Day - an initiative of the World Health Organisation which aims to raise awareness of HIV/AIDS as a local and global issue.
This is more than just another one of those “days” – rather it is a timely and very important reminder that the disease is not dead. Sadly it is alive and moves with stealth through the community.
Children who watched the Grim Reaper commercial back in the 1980s are now grown up – some with children of their own. It is critical that we do not allow this issue to slip off the political and community agendas. Quite simply, the stakes are too high.
Today we need better sex education in Victorian schools to raise awareness of the rising HIV/AIDS infection rates across the state. This is still a serious disease with no cure so awareness and prevention is the only defence.
We do not expect our students to be able to add and subtract, to know their capital cities or to write an essay without proper teaching. So it is with sex education – a subject which if taken into the classroom with care may even save a life or two.
We need to talk about condoms, we need to talk about poor choices made under the influence of alcohol and drugs, and we need to talk about the need for young people to keep themselves safe and to protect others.
World AIDS Day is telling us ‘Prevention is everybody’s business’. This means adolescents as well. We need to be teaching our pre-teens and teenagers about sexual health, including the importance of preventing HIV/AIDS.
Sex education is the vital first step to prevention. Sex education can reduce teenage pregnancies, reduce unwanted sex and reduce the rate of sexual transmitted inflections including HIV.
The statistics make for a compelling case to take sex education seriously. In Victoria, rates of newly diagnosed HIV infection rose from 4.5 per 100 000 population in 2002 to 5.6 in 2006. And, worryingly, the annual number of new HIV diagnoses in Australia has gradually increased over the past seven years, following a long-term decline.
Today we don’t necessarily need another Grim Reaper visiting out living rooms. Just some structured education in the classroom.
We owe it to our children.
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