I can think of few things that should be less controversial than teaching young children the concept of consent.

We talk about consent in my house all the time, though we don’t often call it that. I teach my children that they own their own bodies, and other people own their own bodies, and each person gets to decide what they are going to do with their body or have done to it. Usually, with my children, this applies to things like wrestling and hair pulling. But the core lesson about the importance of respecting bodily autonomy is one that should apply to all aspects of life.

To the extent the concept is tricky, the complications arise from how it is applied to things like having to get your boots on and leave the house right now, even if you don’t want to, because we have to pick your brother up at the school bus stop. But we work it out. The general principle stands.

The idea of consent is, and should be, a cornerstone of virtually all human interaction. But talk about teaching it to primary school students, as part of a new health and sexual education curriculum, and it does become controversial, mostly because a sex-obsessed group of cynical moral-panic mongers insist on making it controversial.

This week, the premier held a press conference in which she said, among other things, that consent would be part of the elementary school curriculum, including primary school lessons on “learning listening skills and helping each other to pay attention to facial expressions and what they mean and whether somebody is positive or negative or happy or sad.” This, she said, would be a building block for “interpersonal ability and intelligence.” That sounds like common sense.

But later that day, Ontario Progressive Conservative candidate Patrick Brown weighed in during a debate. “Right now the only thing Kathleen Wynne’s talking about is Grade 1 sex education,” said the MP from Barrie, noting his opposition. “What I believe our focus should be is on reading, writing and arithmetic.”

As if somehow you’ve got the multiplication tables on one hand and recognizing your classmates as independent human beings on the other, and the concepts are mutually irreconcilable — impossible to teach in the same short school day. And as if, to go back to the first part of his comment, he thinks that saying “sex” and “Grade 1” in the same sentence will score cheap political points.

The next day, sexual outrage monger Charles McVety, leader of the Institute of Canadian Values, which successfully whipped up opposition the last time a sexual education curriculum overhaul was proposed in 2010, was quoted in the Toronto Sun with his impressionistic take on the “abhorrent” immorality of “teaching 6-year-olds to consent to sex.” He said, “Teachers will be forced to teach little children how to give permission for that child to engage in sex.”

Now that’s clearly not what’s being discussed. That perverse scenario comes not from Wynne’s education proposals but from the depths of McVety’s own imagination.

But teaching sexual consent is important, and I’m glad Wynne brought it to the curriculum conversation. Later in school, we’re told, at an age when sexual education is more specifically taught to those in adolescence, the idea of sexual consent will be taught alongside updated material on practices such as sexting. As it should be.

On the same day as Wynne’s press conference, I read an unrelated news item about yet another threatened “leak” of nude photos allegedly stolen from a teen celebrity’s phone by hackers. A story like that seems to appear every week, illustrating both the present-day ubiquity of sexy-picture-taking and the apparent widespread disrespect shown to the consent of those involved.

The thing about the moral panic over teaching kids about sexual-related topics is that the dangers people fear — that their kids will see or take sexual photos, or will get ideas about having sex, or will face sexual pressure — are things that are happening, and that they will encounter (usually earlier than we’d choose) whether we teach children about them or not. Technological changes aside, this has always been true. The only question is whether we teach our children in a way that prepares them to make wise decisions when they do.

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Understanding consent — the ability to give it or withhold it, the importance of respecting it — is fundamental to making those wise decisions. The concept is useful to children well before they develop any understanding of sexuality. The abhorrent thing here is that there are people who think teaching consent is controversial. Or, more likely, that they want to make it controversial for their own perverse political purposes.

Edward Keenan can be reached at ekeenan@thestar.ca ekeenan@thestar.ca END . Follow: @thekeenanawire.

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