Parents in Britain must be told what their children are learning about in their sex education classes, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has said.
Schools should be transparent with parents about the content taught during their sex education classes, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has said.
It comes ahead of a review into the Department of Education’s sex ed guidelines for schools, with publications in the country recently revealing that children as young as 11 are sometimes taught about oral and anal sex during lessons, with others also being instructed to believe that transgenderism is fact.
Having already sparked outrage within certain elements of the ruling Conservative Party, Britain’s Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has now publicly added that he too was taken back by the revelations.
“I was concerned by the reports that I’ve seen, and that’s why it’s important that we review this and get it right,” The Telegraph reports him as saying.
Sunak went on to say that he was speaking as a parent more so than as a Prime Minister when he said he was concerned about what was going on in schools, adding that recent milestones in his own family life had made him more sensitive to certain issues facing British society.
“These materials are obviously sensitive. I speak as a parent, first and foremost, rather than a politician,” he said. “It’s important that it’s age-appropriate and it’s important that parents know what’s going on and have access to those materials.”
“If that’s not happening, then we need to make sure that it is and that’s why it’s right that we do a proper review of the situation,” he went on to say.
Sunak also used current concern from parents about transgenderism as an opportunity to play up Britain’s censorious Online Safety Bill, a piece of legislation which if enacted will further tighten restrictions on freedom of speech in the United Kingdom.
The legislation is packaged as being a means to protect children from harmful content — legal and illegal — online, however it does not appear that the proposed measures would shield young children from transgender ideology content, evidently a concern of parents in the United Kingdom.
However, it does aim to put a stop to devices using end-to-end encryption, a move that has been slammed as a massive invasion of privacy by campaigners.
A number of major messaging applications, such as Signal and WhatsApp, have now openly said that they would rather leave the British market than implement the changes that would be mandated under a coming Online Safety Act.
“We won’t lower the security of WhatsApp,” platform head Will Cathcart reportedly said regarding the bill. “We have never done that — and we have accepted being blocked in other parts of the world.”
Meanwhile, the head of Signal, Meredith Whittaker, said that it was “magical thinking” that firms could turn off privacy for criminals such as child pornographers, but not for everyone else.
“Encryption is either protecting everyone or it is broken for everyone,” she said, adding that her company “would absolutely, 100% walk” from the UK market if the measure was implemented.
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