Victims Deserve To Have Their Stories Heard
If they wish to share their stories, we must honour their bravery
A little background info
Once upon a time there was a little bigot living in a small town. She had a few like-minded (small-minded) friends, and mostly associated with others who shared her beliefs.
One day she was taking a tour of her local middle-school library and was outraged to find pride flags, LGBTQ books, and (shock, horror) a sign saying “all are welcome here”!
Miss Bigot did what any sensible stay-at-home-mom who posts videos online for attention would do. She went around that library taking pictures of these “offensive” pride symbols (did I mention this was June — y’know, Pride Month?).
Miss Bigot took to the Internet and shared her pictures along with inflammatory statements, inciting outrage from her band of fellow simpletons.
She wasn’t satisfied with that.
Those posts didn’t quite earn as many likes, shares, and comments as she had hoped. Miss Bigot needed to think bigger. She recruited some of her fellow small-minded community members and asked them to help her find the most shocking sentences she could from any of the non-fiction books in that public school library.
Now she was on a roll.
Miss Bigot contacted everyone she could think of: the librarian (even asking for the names of the students who had taken out certain books she found distasteful), the principal, even the superintendent.
When that didn’t get her enough attention, Miss Bigot decided to throw caution into the wind and delegate to the entire board of trustees, asking to have all books with any kind of sexual content banned from this middle-school (grades 6–8) library.
She underestimated us
For some unknown reason, the simpleton who wants books banned thought she would be better read than proponents of freedom of expression and access to diverse literature.
Weird, huh?
While she read her statement to the board, I noticed a number of things. I recognized passages from books I had read — books that were published 10–20 years ago, and that were memoirs and books of poetry, not sexual education books.
When the recording of the meeting was released, I thought I’d better have a second look.
I had a hard time believing that any “person in a position of authority can never counsel a person to touch anyone, not themselves or others, in a sexual way because that would be sexual exploitation as defined by section 153 of the criminal code of Canada”, as was claimed during the delegation.
My bullshit detector was right once again. The delegate had conspicuously left out the highly significant phrase “for a sexual purpose” — not once, but three different times in her speech that evening.
We need to talk about it
I’ve ranted about the lies and misdirections. Now my question is: Instead of trying to ban books about sexual assault, why not use that energy to protect people from being assaulted in the first place?
People need to be able to tell and read these stories so that it’s safe to talk about sexual assault and abuse.
When we continue to make these subjects taboo, we make it easier for predators to assault and abuse people because we’re all afraid to talk about it. It’s not the victim’s shame to hide, it’s the perpetrator’s.
Shaming victims into silence and preventing youth from learning about the potential dangers only puts them at greater risk.
I would love to shelter my child from all the evils of the world, but I would be naïve and negligent as a parent were I to do so. Knowledge is protection.
Comprehensive sexual health education is protective, not predatory. A 2021 study by Goldfarb & Lieberman concluded that comprehensive and inclusive sexual education led to the following outcomes:
appreciation of sexual diversity
dating and intimate partner violence prevention
development of healthy relationships
prevention of child sex abuse
improved social/emotional learning
increased media literacy
This study, among others, have concluded that “substantial evidence supports sex education beginning in elementary school, that is scaffolded and of longer duration, as well as LGBTQ–inclusive education across the school curriculum and a social justice approach to healthy sexuality”.
A final message to the bigots
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