Examination of Witnesses (Questions 820-825)
THURSDAY 9 JANUARY 2003
DR TREVOR
STAMMERS, MR
ROBERT WHELAN
AND MS
GILL FRANCES
820. You dispute that? You do not think it was?
(Mr Whelan) As I have said, if you say it is successful
you would have to show that health education has an impact on
the way in which people behave and that is a very difficult area
to prove.
(Dr Stammers) It did change behaviour but it was not
lasting.
(Mr Whelan) That is what I am going to say. It changed
behaviour briefly. If you look at the statistics for rectal gonorrhea,
which are a pretty good indicator of homosexual activity, they
dipped at the end of the 1980s but then they started to climb
again because the cataclysm, the holocaust, promised by all these
images of coffins and the Grim Reaper with his scythe and so on
never happened.
Dr Naysmith: It is happening in some South Africa
countries now.
J
im Dowd
821. That is because the message was if you
do not do anything this will happen but people did things and
it did not happen.
(Mr Whelan) What did they do?
822. They changed behaviour.
(Mr Whelan) No, I do not think they did change behaviour.
Studies indicate that they did not.
(Ms Frances) We stopped giving the message and the
figures are going up. That is what is scarey. In a recent piece
of work from the HIV Forum, which is also at NCB, they have been
doing consultations with young people and whereas ten years ago
if I had asked a group of young people what HIV is, what they
would do, they would tell me pat but the young people who came
to consult with us and help us run the project said the reason
why they had come was because they had never been taught about
HIV in school. It is not being delivered in many schools. Also,
lots of our children do have family and friends living in other
countries where the countries are absolutely devastated by HIV.
I do not think we can marginalise HIV, if anything I think we
have got to bring it back into the frame and have it very much
as part of sex education in schools because it is not being looked
after and supported in schools at the moment.
J
ulia Drown
823. I want to understand this concern better
that Dr Stammer talked about, the link between child abuse, pornography
and sex education information. I want to know if Gill Frances
shares that worry? Also, can you help us understand that, are
you say there are pictures of children having sex, what are you
saying there?
(Dr Stammers) The place that has shown
me the images that worried me has been the booklet called "Sex
in Schools" that looked at the situation in Scotland published
by the Christian Institute. If you have a look at some of the
images in that that is the kind of thing that is unacceptable
and should not be shown to primary school children because they
will be terribly thrown and wonder what on earth is going on.
824. You are talking about an example in Scotland,
are you generally happy with the information in schools?
(Dr Stammers) I think sometimes focusing on material
can blur the importance of the wider issues
that we have spoken about this morning, and I am
much more concerned about that. If you have dreadful material
and good parents at home they—
825. Counter the balance.
(Dr Stammers)—are able to counter the material.
I am not saying it is not so bad but they can counter the effects
of it.
(Ms Frances) If you work within the SRE guidance then
you will have developed a programme round SRE, whether it be primary
or secondary schools, in which the children you are teaching,
the young people you are teaching and their parents and carers
will have engaged in and looked through the resources. I have
never actually met a teacher who would take a weird visual thing
into a classroom, teachers by their nature tend to be conventional.
It may have happened, it may be happening but I have never, ever
seen it.
Chairman: Can I thank our witnesses for a very
interesting session. Thank you very much.
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