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Consent 101

2/22/2018

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Am working at the moment on collating all the resources I've written about consent so as to make them available to youth workers, teachers and parents in the near future. I had intended to write some pieces here about girls stuff after starting with boys stuff but am full of consensual thoughts so girls will have to wait...

Above is my favourite consent video, it's funny, elegant, sweary, and completely instructional without preaching. Incredibly most young people I come across have never seen it so pass it on if you love it too.

Consent is a gnarly emotive subject and for most adults it's one of the ones we feel at sea about (a lot changed in a short time) and so we don't have conversations with our small ones until it's too late.

We have long taught our girls not to get raped/assaulted. The times (and laws) are changing to focus on teaching perpetrators not to rape/assault. This sounds simple and obvious but actually requires a massive cultural and relational shift and produces surprising reactions in most of us...

Can you be asking for it if you wear a short skirt?
Should you expect sexual activity at the end of a date you paid for?
Can two drunk people consent to sex?
What about one drunk person and one sober person?
If you flirt all night and get into bed with the person at the end of the night, can you still refuse sex?
If you don't hear a 'No', does that mean you're good to go?
Do some women need persuading? Often a 'No' eventually becomes an 'OK then...'

Much more to come....


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More boys

2/11/2018

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So it's cute huh? A boy, he's noise with dirt on him. But how many quiet clean boys do we know? And how many noisy dirty girls? And if it's not many then why not? 

Science tells us that this stuff is not innate. It is instilled. By us. And a million trillion billion teeny social factors - for the subtlety of this see the BBC toys experiment - www.youtube.com/watch?v=nWu44AqF0iI - it's only 3 minutes long - I love one of the adults' reactions that she was astounded by her own behaviour because she thought she had a really open mind :D ).

Another factor to consider is that in our current cohort of 16-25's, 20% do not identify as wholly one gender or another. It's a big subject that I'll wonder about in the future but for the sake of this particular wondering :- if 20% of our kids are going to at the very least question their gender, then our stereotypes are really going to annoy them!!

So if we want quiet, sensitive, gentle boys, or bold, loud, whole-hearted girls or just fully alive engaged humans, then maybe we will have to start thinking out of our boxes, encouraging, cheering, cajoling, praising, calling them on to be whatever they are whatever the shapes of their bits...
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A place to start - Boys

2/11/2018

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Picture
So the plan is to use this as a space to write about what's going on out there in the world of sex and young people, all the many shades of craziness, all the wonderings and worryings.

A place to gather articles and research and see what I can apply/steal to make my work better and my thinking more rounded.

So I'll start with an olllld post from an olllld blog so as to get the ball rolling...

​Today I found myself writing this to another youthworker and I guess it's a good starting place for wondering about boys and what's happening to them.....


"I'll pull together some stuff on boys - there's lots ideas around about social and emotional pressures on boys as to why they 'act out' in this way....I've got an article somewhere about the fact that it's not testosterone as was always presumed as boys and girls have similar levels of it pre-puberty but boys behaviour is different from much younger,
There's also stuff around the idea of 6ish and 13ish being key ages for boys emotionally as 6 is when (generally) they unattach from Mum and attach to Dad - it's a crunch time if Dad is absent or distant (physically or emotionally) as this is when they should be learning about male emotion through modelling. It's also the age when empathy develops and this is ideally learnt by directly observing your Dad care for your Mother......
Then when you're 13 you begin the same search for social and emotional markers amongst your friends but if you haven't had a strong positive role model from age 6 then this experience can be incredibly shaky and confusing. At a time when being vulnerable in any way other than anger is completely socially unacceptable.............
There's a great piece of number crunching done by the Canadian equivalent of childline showing that boys disappear as service users aged 13 and then reappear aged 17. Reports around self-esteem in teens conflict but many suggest that boys at least report a more robust self-esteem. BUT this has to be laid against our terrible suicide (greatest killer of young men in the UK) and violence and crime stats for young men......
The work I do in schools with boys is repeatedly coming up with the same issues. Emotion of any kind is completely unacceptable other than anger and humour. Any attempt to open up those issues with groups takes a lot of trust and de-sensitizing but even in the most positive groups I would say that for at least half of the boys there isn't just a reticence to deal with emotionality, there's a complete lack of language or recognition.....
When they get to year 11 it does change, the reticence breaks down quicker and there is relief to be finally able to talk about this stuff, but it's still very closely regulated by the groups and I sense an enormous amount of self-censoring...."

No conclusions or anything, just a place to start...
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    Debs

    Just wondering...

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