Blaming and punishing instead of guiding and helping sexually active adolescents is an ages old victimising custom which lets parents, other caregivers, family and broader society off the hook. This custom contributes to the continuing denial of infantile and childhood sexuality which needs to be nurtured and protected rather than acted on and awakened too early by adult carers.
Toddlers and young children need appropriate information at all ages about sexual matters in order to develop into adolescents who start experimenting with relationships, so that they can become adults who lead healthy lives which are also sexually fulfilling. From young, children need careful and mindful assistance as they get to know their own bodies. Children also need to learn touching themselves in a sexual way is fine but needs to happen in private.
Apart from loving and thoughtful care by family, parents and other adult carers, children may view all forms of inappropriate touching or play by adults or other children with a healthy suspicion. All children need to be enabled to say no to such emotional or bodily intrusion from the moment that they can indicate their non-consent. Adult carers need to become much more attuned to babies’ healthy ability to say no when being passed on to hands that feel unsafe. Instead of extinguishing this response, they need to affirm it so it becomes entrenched.
Once children feel in control of their sexuality they can grow into adolescents who are informed about their experimentation and sexual choices. Informed and protected adolescents will in most instances be able to protect themselves against inappropriate advances from others or going too far against their will with a peer.
The father of modern day psychology, Sigmund Freud, evoked strong reactions in the 1900s when he revealed that children are sexual and need their adult carers to protect rather than prematurely awaken their sexuality. Despite many advances in the field of reproductive health since then and especially in the last 50 years, society’s denial of children’s sexuality is still broadly in place. Today parents still do not discuss sexual issues with their children. Nor do they give them information about puberty and adolescence and the tumultuous changes that will occur in their minds and bodies as they mature. Inappropriate sexual handling of babies and children, which can result in premature sexual activity in adolescents, still remains rife today because it is hidden.
Children’s open interest in sexuality changes and retreats into privacy when they enter primary school. At this stage, older children begin to prefer to stick to friendships with children of their own gender. At puberty boys and girls (who generally mature before boys of the same age) become curious about touching, feeling and kissing a girl or boy they are attracted to. Sometimes these encounters result in having sex, especially when children are not consciously aware of their growing sexual interest or when a culture of mutual consent is not inculcated. Very often young adolescents who become sexually active have been sexualised before when they were not ready to be sexually active. They battle to fight their very strong sexual urges to be sexually active partly because of the intensity of their physical impulse, also because they confuse physical attentions with love and care.
Instead of trying to understand why adolescents become sexually active prematurely society behaves punitively towards them, as if young people should have known better, as if their bodies do not belong to themselves and they therefore do not deserve to be informed about them, as if they should not repeat patterns laid down unconsciously by their parents and grandparents and the other generations that preceded them.
Many an adult woman can today still remember how the arrival of her first period was greeted with great suspicion, how it was equated with sexual activity. Yesterday’s adolescents at times also share how they were humiliated requesting contraception. It’s public knowledge that many adolescents die and are damaged in risky traditional initiation ceremonies. All of which point to the existence of punitive, even unconsciously murderous, practices that persist and hurt adolescents.
Instead of rigidifying the victimisation of adolescents into law society needs broad educational programmes for all adult carers of children and adolescents that can help them guide and protect their charges. These programmes also need to focus on individual psychology because we will not achieve the needed change if there is no examination of how individuals’ sexuality is shaped both consciously and unconsciously.
A focus on the psychology of the individual will also help foster a broad understanding of how sexual coercion and violence come about – that those who coerce and abuse also experienced coercion and abuse at some, often early, point in their lives and that they are perpetuating patterns that will be transmitted from one generation to the next. These patterns can only be changed if both victims and offenders are helped to understand how their behaviours came about.
We should all contribute to bring about a broad, multidisciplinary approach aimed at guiding, protecting and cherishing adolescent sexuality which ensures the survival of humankind.
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*First published on the Psychoanalytic Voice, the official public mouthpiece for the South African Psychoanalytic Confederation (SAPC).