Child sexual abuse: Early education, not death penalty, is what we need

By Patrick Lee - Free Malaysia Today,

FMT INTERVIEW Civic groups have long been calling for a sex education programme to be incorporated into the school curriculum. They claim that sex crimes would decrease as a result.
However, the call has often met with stiff resistance, particularly from politicians.

Kelantan Chief Minister Nik Abdul Aziz Nik Mat, for example, has said that sex education would encourage youths to have more sex, leading to more cases of baby dumping.

Some of these politicians seem to contend that sex crimes are better prevented by harsher penalties than by openly discussing the private parts of human beings.

DAP strongman Karpal Singh has said that child rapists deserve the death penalty and the Federal Cabinet has asked the police to treat baby dumping as murder.

In this second part of an interview with FMT, Nooreen Preusseur of Protect and Save the Children (PSC) tells why sex education is necessary and why imposing the death penalty on child-sex offenders will make the problem worse.

FMT: Why do you oppose the death penalty when it comes to child sexual abuse?

The hallmark of child sexual abuse is secrecy. The sex offender will get the child to keep it a secret through threats. “If you tell, I will kill your mom.” “If you tell, they'll take you away and put you in a children's home.”

If you understand the dynamics of child sexual abuse, you will not accept capital punishment. What the sex offender will say is, “If you tell, they're going to put me in jail, and they're going to kill me, and my death is on your head.”

The child is never going to tell. The reporting of cases will go down as a result.

And this is a false positive. When the death penalty was introduced in the Philippines (for the same crime), they noticed that the reporting went down, and the government claimed this showed that it worked.

Instead, the abuse went on. It was the reporting of cases that went down.

The offender now has a really powerful threat over the child. And if the child loves the offender, he or she is not going to tell because, “This is my uncle whom I love, and if they kill him, it's my fault.”

I thought capital punishment would deter adults from committing sexual abuse.
Capital punishment, fines, jail sentences are not deterrents. A deterrent is if everybody becomes a child protector, giving an offender no chance. The way we're going about it right now, we're actually helping sex offenders.

People don't talk about sex or their private parts. Children are not taught the correct names for their body parts.

We (at PSC) include the mouth as a private body part. While we don't explain to the children why, we say that we control what goes into our mouths. “What goes into our mouths is safe and clean and healthy. Nothing else.” “It's a part of my body I protect as well.”

Because the children don't know their sexuality, a sex offender can use this taboo to target children. It's very easy to tell a ten-year-old boy who is being forced to perform oral sex, “This is normal. This is part of what men do. I'm teaching you how to be a real man.”

Do you think that it is the responsibility of parents or the education system to teach about sex?

I think it's both. It's not fair for either set of adults to shift the responsibility to the other. The teachers can't say it's the parent's responsibility and vice versa. It is a joint responsibility. As adults, if we are to be child protectors, giving the children the proper information is our responsibility.

At what age should children be taught about sex?

You should start with pre-school kids. Teach them the names of the private parts. A four-year-old can understand that. And the beauty of it is that if they're taught in a non-judgmental, open way about a healthy body, they start thinking, “Oh, my vagina is part of me! Big deal!”

That's how a four-year-old would think. But it's the adults who make it into a big deal. It's the adults who faint if they hear the word “penis” or hear a child say it. It's not a dirty word. It's part of a healthy body.

But adults make it sounds like a dirty word.

It's a problem with the adults, not the kids. Age three or four is usually a good time to start. You teach the correct names of the private body parts. You also send a signal to them about these parts, that they are to be protected, that they are private.

At some point, if a child's mother or someone else in the family gets pregnant, a common question is: “Where do babies come from?

This is a wonderful opportunity for parents to introduce age-appropriate sex education. You don't have to talk about eggs and sperm and ovaries. To a four-year-old, you could say, “Mummies and daddies have a special kind of love that creates new babies.”

It's an accurate answer. Not the stork or, “We found you in the garbage can.” I actually heard someone tell a child that. It doesn't do wonders for the child's self-esteem.

It's not just weird. It's downright alarming.

They also tell the child, “That's none of your business.” A lot of adults are shy about talking about sex.

But there's an easy solution. You can get books about these things and you can read them to your child. A good example is It's Not the Stork. It's a great picture book for six-year-olds.

But you have heard arguments that say if you were to give children sex education, you would actually encourage them to have more sex.

There is an overwhelming wealth of research evidence that shows if you start sex education early—and I mean pre-school—by the time these kids become teenagers, you will have fewer cases of unwanted pregnancies. And fewer cases of STIs (sexually transmitted infections).

Will we have the same number of teenagers having sex?

You’ll have the same number where they are taught and where they are not. But you will have fewer unwanted pregnancies, and you'll solve your baby abandoning issue.

So what about measures to prevent baby dumping such as the baby hatch or music videos on television telling people not to dump their babies?

I think they've wasted their money. It's not going to work. If you want to prevent unwanted pregnancies, you need to have a holistic and comprehensive sex education module that runs from pre-school to secondary. In doing so, you empower children with knowledge, and you give them a sense of self-worth.

If children feel that they are valued, then they're going to protect themselves. You then teach them skills, such as saying “no” or thinking about decisions they have to make when they get into their teenage years, when peer pressure starts mounting.

Once children have decision-making skills, then they start thinking things through. When a fourteen-year-old thinks, “I'm worth something. I value myself. I'm the boss of my body,” he would say '”No” when his friends are telling him to have sex.

It's been proven?

Well, I'm not saying they won't have sex, but they'll have safe sex. Children in this country are having sex. There's no doubt about that. It's been shown from surveys done years ago that children as young as twelve are sexually active.

Are children going to have sex anyway?

Not really. If you do give them an idea of self-worth, they'll make their own decisions. I knew a number of teenagers who had a solid sense of self-worth, and they delayed their sexual activity until their 20s or their 30s. They'd think, “No. Even if he says he loves me, I'm not ready to have sex. I can say no.”

I know a sixteen-year-old woman who, although her hormones were telling her to have sex with her boyfriend, valued herself. And she was able to use her decision-making skills and say no to sex.

So you think that sex offenders are able to get away with because children don't have a sense of self-worth?
Yes, and they don't know enough about sexuality to make their own informed choices. If a child doesn't know about sexuality, it is easier for the offender to say that this is what people who love each other do. The child can make that decision and say no.

But what if the offender forces his way in?
If the child is forced into it, he or she can't do anything. But now, the child can tell. Because the child knows that it was wrong. He would think, “Even if uncle loves me, and I love him, he does not have the right to do this.