The Christian Institute has slammed World Health Organization (WHO) sexuality education guidance recommending that children under four should receive information about masturbation and their “right to explore gender identities”.
The WHO Regional Office for Europe and Federal Centre for Health Education (BZgA) document, titled ‘Standards for Sexuality Education in Europe’, contains a “Sexuality education matrix” recommending that, among other thing, children aged 0-4 should be given information about “enjoyment and pleasure when touching one’s own body, early childhood masturbation” and “the right to explore gender
identities”.
The matrix further recommends that children aged 4-6 should be given information about “same-sex relationships” and the “skills” to “consolidate their gender identity”; that children aged 6-9 should be given information about “the positive influence of sexuality on health and wellbeing”; and children aged 9-12 given information about “first sexual experience” and “gender orientation” as well as the “skills” to “Enable children to… make a conscious decision to have sexual experiences or not”.
Commenting on the UN agency’s guidance, the Christian Institute remarked that it had “repeatedly warned that children should not be exposed to material which sexualises them.”
The non-denominational Christian charity claimed that it had forced Warwickshire County Council in England to withdraw an ‘All About Me’ sex and relationships education programme, rolled out in some 200 primary schools, in March, because it “encouraged masturbation and included ‘gratuitously graphic’ sexual images yet made no reference to marriage”.
The Institute further alleged that the programme “encouraged schools not to inform parents if their children would be sharing overnight accommodation with pupils of the opposite sex” and to “conceal a child’s transgender status from their own parents”.
“The highly explicit imagery and one-sided ideology of ‘All About Me’ has no place in Primary Relationships Education,” commented John Denning, the Christian Institute’s Education Officer.
“[Relationships and Sex Education] must be balanced, objective and critical, not pushing particular controversial views such as transgender ideology,” he added.