A year ago, at the height of the #MeToo movement and with new allegations of sexual assault hitting the news on a seemingly daily basis, third-grade teacher Liz Kleinrock was fed up.
“Where does this toxicity end?” Kleinrock asked herself. “And how can we take proactive measures to stop it?”
Her answer was to teach her students at Citizens of the World Silver Lake Charter School in Los Angeles about consent. After some discussion, Kleinrock and her students created a poster that collected their ideas to create a definition of consent.
Consent is often linked to sex, but it simply means giving permission. When taught to children, it can be applied to a variety of nonsexual situations—giving hugs, borrowing things, and sharing are scenarios Kleinrock’s students came up with.
Although sex is removed from the equation when teaching consent to elementary students, the end goal is to help prevent sexual harassment and assault by teaching students about personal boundaries, how to say no, and how to respect no—and in the unfortunate case that students do experience sexual abuse or harassment, how to ask for help.
One in four girls and one in 20 boys are sexually abused before the age of 18, and about 35 per cent of sexual abuse victims are under 12 years old—elementary school age. And in a 2018 national survey, over 80 per cent of women and 40 per cent of men reported experiencing some form of sexual harassment or assault in their lifetime.
But teaching consent is not just about decreasing the prevalence of sexual violence and harassment, according to Jett Bachman, a K–5 sexuality educator for Day One, a nonprofit focused on ending dating abuse and domestic violence among youth. “It’s also a proactive way of providing young people with the tools they need to have healthy relationships with themselves and other people throughout their lives,” Bachman said.
THE LANDSCAPE OF CONSENT EDUCATION
Teaching consent is a recent development. Ten states and Washington, DC, recommend including consent education as part of sex education; only Oregon and California suggest that consent education starts in kindergarten.
The guidance on consent education looks different from state to state. The Oregon Department of Education outlines what to teach: defining consent, describing how relationship power imbalances could impact personal boundaries, and being able to say—and respect hearing—no. California provides sample activities on how to teach consent. But what teachers and schools are missing is explicit instruction on how to teach it.
And not everyone agrees that it’s an educator’s job to teach consent. “It remains the job of the parents to discuss intimacy et al., with their children. Strangers are NOT equipped to speak for me,” parent Anne Fernandes wrote on Facebook in response to an Edutopia article about creating a culture of consent in the classroom.
