The President, Family Watch International and Chair person, UN Family Rights Caucus, Sharon Slater has condemned the teaching of Comprehensive Sexuality Education, CSE in schools, which she said is an agenda by the western world and some international bodies to sexualize underage children.
Slater who made this known at a press briefing recently in Lagos also advised parents and policy makers in Africa to go to their schools to see what the children are being taught there.
Said she: “Comprehensive Sexuality Education being taught in the schools means deciding when they should have sex, and that they have a right to have sex, and this is for children. It also brings in the transgender agenda and teaches about transphobia and phamaphobia, it teaches about right to abortion; it has also some teachings that are premature for children of minor age like sexual pleasure.
“So, we are bringing a warning message to parents, to policy makers here to go look what is in the schools; what’s being founded by the western governments in partnership with International Planned Parenthood Federation. The association here is called Planned Parenthood Federation of Nigeria; they are the number one pushers of this radical sexuality education. Am not talking about just sex education, children need sex education; they need to understand how their body works, how to protect themselves. This (CSE) is a completely different thing that parents need to go make sure is not taught in the schools”.
Speaking on the negative impact of CSE on children, society and the family, Slater revealed that a great number of the programmes pushed by these bodies have failed because rather than solving problems, they increased the sexual risk behavior taken by young people.
Explained Slater: “There’s actually this study that is being published in a periodic journal this week. It is called the sexed report, and it can be found on sexedreport.org and it shows that 89 percent of all these programmes in the schools across Africa have actually failed. They don’t prevent teen pregnancy, they don’t prevent STIs and all the things that they claim, and in fact, they are increasing the risk behaviours; 24 percent of them increase the sexual risk taken by youths in Africa.
“So, we are promoting something called sexual risk avoidance education where children can avoid a hundred percent of the risks. This is a programme that teaches children if they are even sexually active, that they can return to abstinence and protect themselves and work on their education, have their childhood and wait until they are older and the time they are married before they start engaging in sexual behaviours”.
She said all the teachings from these international bodies were meant to be a distraction to the African family, and since they realized that they could not capture the adults, they are going after the children.
Revealed she: “The children are going to form the future families, they are going to be the future parents. So, they can capture them young with ideologies such as the transgender ideology where they say you may not be born in the right body; maybe, you are the opposite sex; confusing them about that, teaching them that they have a right to sexual pleasure, teaching them they can have an abortion; they have a right to abortion.
“Many of these programmes send them to sexual reproduction clinics, which they call youth friendly, so they can sell them condoms, contraceptives, abortions, STD treatment, testing. And we know in the United States for example, Planned Parenthood there in the United States was actually caught selling the body parts of the aborted babies, not just the contraceptives and all these pharmaceuticals. And if you think about how much it costs for a child who starts on transgender formals to maintain a routine appointment regiment for their whole life, to maintain a fictitious gender, it will be like two thousand dollars a month. This is a money-making thing, where people can make money of sexualizing children through the CSE programmes, and then, send them to the clinics to buy all their services which they are going to be dependent on for life”.
While noting the need to protect the African family, Slater revealed that the CSE and other agenda by these international bodies are everywhere, including the United States.
Advised she: “I also coach something called the Protect Child Health Coalition because the Planned Parenthood is in my own country. They are pushing this in every state, and every school, and every district; they are the largest provider of Comprehensive Sexuality Education in the world, one of the largest providers of abortion in the world.
“They have 65,000 service points in 170 countries. So, we need as parents across the world, across Africa to know what our children are being taught. We need to go into our schools; we need to ask what sex education manuals that are being used. We need to be careful about what community programmes we enroll our children into because they are even putting these programmes on phone apps. UNFPA has one called tuneme.org, and it has all these bad teachings that children could download. So, we need to be very vigilant as parents across Africa”.
Speaking on the occasion also, Dr. Theresa Okafor, Director, Foundation for African Culture Heritage and African representative, World Congress of Families urged government to support the family institution, so as to save families from disintegrating.
Said Okafor: “I think the government should support large families. Resource utilization and distribution; equity in distribution of resources can also support families because really, the family is what makes society; if the family disintegrates, society will disintegrate. If you want to annihilate society, then you can attack the family. The family needs to be protected because it’s the fundamental unit of society”.
She listed poverty, greed, ignorance, misinformation, poor education as some of the factors militating against the family institution, adding that these could cause disintegration in the family, noting that religion plays a vital role in the family because it teaches the principles of fraternity, forgiveness, unity; religion, integration of families.
Said she: “With religion, you also consider marriage where people understand it to be a permanent union and the importance that commitment and love have to play in marriage as a union between a man and a woman.
“Religion has a key role to play; education has a key role to play. Economic empowerment has a key role to play in integrating families. But again, information is key, so that we don’t undermine those values that actually safeguard the family”.
She revealed that the group goes to schools, and also organizes programmes where families are brought together to learn the key things that matter in marriage.
“I go to schools. For instance, I just came back from England where we had a family enrichment programme. This family enrichment programme is to educate and inform families on temperaments, on marriage and all these key things that matter. In schools, I teach the children abstinence, I teach them how to avoid the mess, and most importantly, I counsel them on career, and I also teach them on how to actually derive benefits from their study, or in other word study skills because if children are kept busy, they will not have time for all of these things”, she said.
She noted that as children are developing, they need to understand their bodies and other things, adding that if not properly harnessed, things can really go wrong with the children.
She urged parents to live up to expectation because they are the primary educators and the only ones that can help their children.
“No one can help your child other than you because when you live it with the teacher, you don’t even know his orientation, you don’t know where he’s coming from. Again, you cannot say that children develop the same; they don’t mature at the same level, so, one has to be very careful who you entrust these sort of sensitive issues to.
“If parents are failing parents, then they ought to be made to live up to their responsibility, so that they can fulfill their roles as primary educators of their children and not abdicate that to the schools, but yes, we can also do more with schools; we go into schools gradually, and then, we also do train the trainer programme where we send our people to different schools. It’s a gradual process, we will get there”, she said.
On his part, Dr. Seyoum Antonios, African Director, Family Watch International and Director, United for Life, Ethopia said currently, the African continent is facing a huge challenge in the form of introducing agendas like Comprehensive Sexuality Education, abortion, phonography and the like that are being sponsored by international agencies.
“This agenda is being pushed by International Planned Parenhood Federation together with UNFP and other UN agencies. They are trying to sexualize our children at an early age why are they doing this? they are saying it’s a way of combating the problem of HIV/AIDS, STIs, teenage pregnancies, and so on, but the outcome has proven by research that implementation of Comprehensive Sexuality Education in fact has promoted HIV, abortion, addiction in our children. The children are getting out of school because they are pregnant of they have impregnated others, and now, it has created so much bother on our meager resource”, he said.
He advised Africans to rise up and take control of their kids, adding that the agencies are trying to separate children from their parents, which he said is unnatural, and is against any religious view or teaching.
“Children should grow under the supervision of their parents till they reach a certain age where they can make their own decisions. The first and most important work to be done is by the parents themselves; they should give the children proper parental support, and they should also give them moral education”, he advised.
He noted that the schools and the teachers are the ones that have been trained to implement Comprehensive Sexuality Education.
“Modules have been formulated, and many teachers have been trained all over Africa to implement the SRH agenda, the Comprehensive Sexuality Education agenda, and through that our children are becoming candidates for even the homosexual agenda because they are now introduced to anal sex, oral sex, masturbation and all forms of promiscuous activities at an early age”, he lamented.
On what these agendas portend for the African continent, said he: “Our biggest resources are our children, and our continent needs these children, but if they are sexualized even if we have the money or the resources, we cannot use them because our children will be subject to addiction, HIV/AIDS, all sort of diseases, and so on. So, it will bring so much distraction and poverty that comes together will further sink our continent into mire of poverty.”
He further advised Africans to reject the bad agendas and teach their kids rightly, the things that they need to know about sex.
“We don’t have to succumb to the pressure these westerners are bringing. They tie it with money; if you don’t accept, they won’t give you aid. Let that aid go away. There are certainly those who have said no, we would rather eat grass than accept homosexual agenda”, he said.
He also advised the government of African countries to look inward and develop their resources rather than accept aids from the western world, which he said usually come with conditions attached to them.
