EDITORIAL - A taboo subject

We are always suspicious of any notion that would keep knowledge away from certain classes of individuals. Hence our discomfort with the current suggestion that Health & Family Life Education or Comprehensive Sexuality Education should be a prohibited subject in local schools.

It was not that long ago that Barbadian parents were given to informing their children who had inquired of their origin that they had arrived by aircraft, or had been brought by a stork, or had been purchased at a store in town. Heaven alone knows to what extent these untruths or mistruths led to unwanted pregnancies by couples, one or other of who had been so ill advised. Inquiries as to matters of religion by children were even more dismissively treated.

There exists an old adage that “knowledge is power”, and it is usually the case that those who would seek to deny knowledge to others do so to maintain the currency of some myth that allows the perpetrator to maintain power or to continue to exert influence over the one denied.

One recalls, in this context, the Index Libri Prohibitorum or List of Prohibited Books, a concept of the Catholic Church that banned a number of publications deemed heretical, anti-clerical or lascivious; an index that was formally abolished as recently as 1969 only. In such circumstances, freedom of enquiry and information, a natural right of mankind, would clearly be severely constrained.

Now, in Barbados, there are those who consider that sexuality is not a suitable topic to be taught to children in schools and should therefore be taboo. We might be willing to accept the argument that sexuality education is best left to parents, although we should be reluctant to entertain a reversion to the dark days of myth referred to earlier, but the inherent weakness of the protagonists’ argument is exposed by the ludicrousness of the nightmare scenarios painted by some of them.

Last weekend, one opponent of the initiative chose to employ two scenarios that would scare the ordinary Barbadian parent into resisters of having his or her child participate in the programme. First, there was his reductio ad absurdum that such education could “turn” Barbadian children into gays. Given the borderline homophobic nature of modern Barbadian society, this was a telling proposition. The idea that one’s son or daughter might not grow into a “normal” heterosexual would be enough to deter some Barbadian parents from supporting any venture that might achieve this, and the glaring failure of the proponent to supply a single instance where this had indeed occurred would be dismissed as a mere technicality.

Nor did he stop there. He was prepared to use another nightmare concept for local parents, terming the instruction “child abuse”. It does not come readily to mind that the narration of the myths of earlier times attracted such a description, even though it might be cogently argued that it was equally so.

We prefer to side with the seemingly lone voice defending freedom of information, Mr. George Griffith, that such education empowers young people to know and demand their rights as sexual beings.

The reality is that most adult Barbadians are not generally comfortable discussing matters of a sexual nature. The number of euphemisms employed for the sex organs and sexual activity is cogent evidence of this reserve, and the current disquiet owes much perhaps to a fear that our children might know too much too soon. That such knowledge is an integral aspect of being a sexually responsible adult counts for naught in the atmosphere of myth and nightmare scenarios that currently prevail.