Teenagers in Scotland campaign to improve education on consent

Every young person should know what consent looks and feels like, online and offline, according to a group of Perthshire teenagers who are pioneering a youth-led upgrade of sex education.

Taking a bracingly honest approach to the deluge of “normalised” soft pornography they say most children are familiar with by the time they enter high school, Bold Girls Ken is the first campaign of its kind in Scotland, with young women designing their own learning materials.

Part of the Young Women Know project, run by NSPCC Scotland and the Young Women’s Movement (YWM), Bold Girls Ken specifically focuses on consent, a topic the group of teenagers believes the current curriculum does not tackle adequately. They want to see consent taught much earlier, to help children understand the concept before they even consider it in a sexual context.

Lucy Allan, 16, said: “They should have lessons about what consent is, not related to sex but in general.”

“There wouldn’t be the laughing factor about consent and sex in PSE [personal and social education] lessons if we’d all been brought up seeing it as a serious and normal topic,” added Hannah Brown, 17.

Once teaching does reach that point, it should emphasise that “consent is enthusiastic”, said Aimee Wallace, 19. “It’s not something you just have to endure, and it can include body language as well as words – are you actively saying ‘yes’ with your body and your language?”

Any discussion of consent must have an online component too, said Allan: “What do you do when you get unsolicited photographs, because you’re obviously not consenting to that?”

The project was prompted by reports from YWM and NSPCC, which plan to run Young Women Know as a national campaign from next April, that revealed the extent of sexual harassment girls and young women experienced in Scottish schools.

Carla Malseed, a local campaigns manager for NSPCC Scotland, described the young women as “experts in their own experiences”. “By listening to young people themselves, we can ensure that messaging is relevant and up to date,” she said.

The Bold Girls Ken group testified that online harassment remained a “really big issue”, coupled with the fact that online and offline lives are these days inseparable.

“If something happens at school or at the park, you can’t go home and escape from that, because it’s always on your phone,” said Allan. “It goes everywhere with you.”

They also had advice for concerned parents and teachers.

“We’re exposed to so much stuff that our parents wouldn’t even know about,” said Brown. “There’s such a vast amount of information and content in the online world that we can’t stop ourselves from seeing it.”

The answer is for parents to educate themselves and keep channels of communication open, no matter how uncomfortable they may find it.

“Make enough space for open conversations and allow children to come to you if they’ve seen something that’s upset them,” said Wallace.

An element of trust and respect for privacy is necessary too. Parents should only go through their children’s phones in cases of immediate danger, they suggested.

“There has to be an element of trust,” said Brown. “It’s your life and you need to learn from your mistakes, but make it known that you’re not going to be angry if they make a mistake, that you can be there and support them”.