This week I had my usual RE lessons with my Grade seven classes at the local primary school. Yes, I am one of those scary people who insidiously work our way into the secular school and try and indoctrinate the children with our fundamentalist theology - or I spend half an hour a week talking to them about God and how to live in God's creation. You know, the usual.
For the last few weeks we have been talking about the ten commandments, and this week we were speaking about those that teach us about how we live with other people - specifically the one normally translated as "You shall not commit adultery". For my teaching I use an excellent version by Ben Van Arragon, which says "We will respect our bodies and the bodies of other people."
We will respect our bodies. Fine. We spoke about eating mainly healthy food, doing plenty of fun exercise and not poisoning it with drugs, alcohol or smoking. The kids were totally with me here! Plenty of suggestions, they knew the drill. We spoke a bit about how God made us and thinks that we are perfect just the way we are, about the pressures to look a certain way and about how damaging that could be. This was a little more challenging for them, as we spoke briefly about Photoshop and social media distorting our ideas of what is 'normal'.
But then came the killer.
How do we respect the bodies of other people? We all know that's it's mean to beat people up, to push them or hurt them... but then we started to speak about progressive consent. I didn't use those words, not at first. We spoke about how sometimes I touch their shoulder as I walked past. I asked if, because they didn't seem to mind me touching their shoulders, that meant I could give them a hug. Well, they thought that was HILARIOUS! Of course I couldn't go round hugging them! Well, I said, what if they were ok with a hug - did that mean I could kiss them? Over the noise of 25 grade sevens pretending to puke I started to talk about the concept of progressive consent - that for every action I wanted to take I needed to get their clear and loud consent, and that this applied to every relationship in their lives. We spoke about 'no' or 'stop' being a clear message that meant we had to stop what we were doing immediately, even if the person seemed to be enjoying it. We talked a little about how if they were ok with a hug yesterday that didn't mean I could hug them today, and about how if they were happy to hug their friends that didn't mean they had to hug me.
When they settled down, I could see the cogs turning in their little heads. It was clear that no one had ever explained this to them so clearly before. These kids are about to go to high school. Their hormones are running wild and for some their first sexual experiences have already started. Unfortunately my time was then up, so I couldn't follow up on this the way I wanted to. But on Tuesday, 50 kids started to learn about what it means to respect their bodies - and those of other people.
Tell me again how I am damaging these kids?
ETA These lessons became even more important to me after I spent some times on the phone with a young woman who had been sexually assaulted by her boyfriend in front of another 'friend'... and who, having broken up with said boyfriend, is being harassed by other 'friends' to take him back because "he's really sorry, and he didn't mean it". When this is seen to be ok, we are doing something wrong.
