Handing out condoms and ever-increasing levels of sex education is like repeatedly giving someone a headache pill that doesn’t work, writes a national columnist today.
“Still the pain continues, so you give them two more and then a specially strong one, refusing to accept the evidence in front of your eyes that the treatment is simply not working,” writes Yasmin Alibhai-Brown in today’s Daily Mail.
“Yet that’s how the Government has responded to Britain’s shamefully high teen pregnancy rates – giving them even more sex education, at a younger and younger age.”
Mrs Alibhai-Brown, who describes herself as a “left-of-centre commentator”, calls the Government’s plan to introduce sex education for primary school children “a mark of desperation”.
“Thereby”, she warns, “you institutionalise the sexualisation of young children, incontrovertibly one of the main reasons for the alarming teen pregnancy statistics”.
She adds: “British children know enough already about sex; it shouts at them from billboards, whispers to them in magazines and newspapers, entices them on the internet and on TV, and consumes them in modern books for children, too.
“The problem is that this sexual awareness is received and ingested but with no guidance on consequences, nor any cautionary social mores.
“And although teenage pregnancies most affect those on low incomes, the valueless universe is affecting all our children.”
Mrs Alibhai-Brown referred to news yesterday that a scheme aiming to cut pregancies among vulnerable teenagers by giving them sexual health education and contraception had instead seen conceptions rise.
She writes: “By any reckoning, it is a monumental failure. Yet I predict that all those on the Left will yet again insist that only more sex education will help free these young women.
“They will insist that only this can free them from the fate that otherwise awaits them, repeating the cycle of teen parenthood through future generations.
“But how can this be right? It makes no sense to me at all, repeating a prescription that is manifestly failing.”
Sex and relationships education is to become part of the national curriculum for both primary and secondary school children.
Family campaigners have warned that the plans will expose children to inappropriate information at an early age.