Comprehensive Sex Education Research Paper

Today I’d like to speak with you on an issue that has been sweeping our nation for centuries. Sexual assault. According to the Huffington Post, every 98 seconds someone in the United States is sexually assaulted. Every 98. While movements like #metoo are bringing light to this horrible topic, simply talking about sexual assault isn’t enough anymore. But there is something we can do to help prevent sexual assault, that starts at the very beginning of our education system. Comprehensive Sex Ed.

Before I continue, I would like to educate you a tad about what comprehensive sex Ed is. Comprehensive Sexuality Education described by Advocates for Youth “A planned, sequential K-12 curriculum that is part of a comprehensive school health education

Suddenly you feel a cold hand grip your arm. That’s what most believe the typical sexual assault situation is. When according to the National Sexual Assault Hotline, 7 out of ten acts of sexual assault are caused by someone the victim already knows. This is a prime example of how the undereducation of our students about sexual assault, causes misperception. The new program I’d Comprehensive Sex Ed could finally properly educate our students on what sexual assault is. As I said earlier, we aren’t really taught about our anatomy until around middle school. This means that most young children can’t comprehend what molestation is because they don’t know that someone touching one part of their body is different than another part. Studies by David Finkelhor, Director of the Crimes Against Children Research Center, show that 1 in 5 girls and 1 in 20 boys is a victim of child sexual abuse. Now imagine if all it took to stop even one of those crimes from being committed was to tell kids that letting someone touch them there wasn’t ok. Wouldn’t you want to tell them? Granted it is the adults fault, but if children don’t know it’s wrong, they won’t report it. If we teach them that that kind of behavior isn’t appropriate, we can help end child assault and catch more perpetrators. Comprehensive Sex Ed also helps raise more awareness about consent. It teaches students not to victim blame with questions like “what were they

According to Advocates of Youth “In December 2004, the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Government Reform released a report showing that 80 percent of the most popular abstinence-only education programs use curricula that distort information about the effectiveness of contraceptives, misrepresent the risks of abortion, blur religion and science, treat stereotypes about girls and boys as scientific fact, and contain basic scientific errors.” Also among youth participating in “virginity pledge” programs, researchers found that 88% broke the pledge and had sex before marriage. Now that you’ve heard about how poorly our current programs teach children about sexual education, let me give you just a few statistics on how well a more comprehensive program educated students. The National Survey of Family Growth found that teens who received Comprehensive Sexual Education, the amount of pregnancies in ages 15-19 dropped 50%. Researcher Douglas Kirby for the National Campaign to End Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy examined studies of prevention programs which had a strong experimental design and used appropriate analysis. Two-thirds of the 48 comprehensive sex ed programs studied had positive effects. 40% delayed sexual initiation, reduced the