As of September 2020, all secondary age children will receive compulsory Relationships, Sex and Health Education. The government have published their plans to teach secondary age children about family, relationships, and sexual health. All of this is fantastic and shows progression from when I left school in 2016, having received one lesson on sex education which taught me about contraception. However, despite the new proposals, there remains to be ambiguity regarding the teaching of sexual abuse and coercion.

No individual of any age should be coerced into engaging in sexual activity, but sadly this happens far too often as people simply do not realise what is happening. My limited sex education meant that I was not taught about relationships that involved abuse, whether that be emotional, physical, or sexual. I had no idea what coercion was, and this remained a mystery until early 2019 when I was informed of it, and realised that I had, in fact, been a victim of this at the time of receiving sex education. If the signs of sexual abuse and coercion had been made explicit within sex education, then it would not have taken me three years to realise that I had been a victim.

“No” means no. But so does, “I don’t want to,” “I don’t feel like it,” “I’m not sure,” along with hundreds of other cues that all communicate the same message – that that person does not want to engage in sexual activity. Young people need to be taught that if they are being persuaded into unwanted sexual activity that they should recognise this as sexual coercion. There should be zero allowance for ambiguity and uncertainty when it comes to consent, and young people must be made aware of this to protect themselves. Single acts of sexual abuse and coercion may last minutes, but the effects on the victim can last a lifetime. Peer pressure is all too prevalent within our society, and having sex is treated like a competition. With that being said, it needs to be made clear to all secondary age children that convincing someone to have sex with them is coercing, whether they see it that way or not, and it should be explicitly discouraged.

In the year to the end of March 2017, the Crime Survey for England and Wales (CSEW) estimated that, since the age of 16, 20% of women and 4% of men had experienced some type of sexual assault. This is the equivalent to 3.4 million women and 631,000 men. They also estimated that 3.1% of women and 0.8% of men aged 16 to 59 had experience a sexual assault in that year alone – equivalent to near 650,000 people in total. These are estimations, and we cannot be certain of reality. But if it happened to me and my friends without realising, then I am sure it has happened to hundreds if not thousands more young people across the UK. With explicit and firm education on this topic, the above statistics have the potential to be lower.

Please join me in signing this petition and sharing via social media. I am in the process of establishing a petition for the gov.uk website also.