John Oliver on sex education in America, and how abstinence only shames young women.

Okay I know I have shared these videos with you before, and they are all great, but seriously this one is amazing!

In fact I would like to see this shown to high school kids during their human development class as part of the curriculum, it is THAT good.

Colorado proves that education, not slut shaming, is the best way to prevent teen pregnancies.

Courtesy of Pew Charitable Trusts:  

President Barack Obama hailed a landmark achievement in his State of the Union address last month: Teen pregnancies in the U.S. have hit an all-time low. But the U.S. still has a teen birthrate of 31.2 per 1,000 teens, nearly one-and-a-half times the rate in the United Kingdom, which has one of the highest rates in Western Europe. 

Colorado may have found a way to close the gap. The state’s teen birthrate dropped 40 percent between 2009 and 2013, driven largely by a public health initiative that gives low-income young women across the state long-acting contraceptives such as intrauterine devices (IUDs) and hormonal implants. 

Backed by $23.5 million from the Susan Thompson Buffett Foundation, Colorado attracted national recognition for its program after Democratic Gov. John Hickenlooper announced the results of a cost-savings study last summer. The state saved $42.5 million in 2010 alone, an average return of $5.85 in avoided Medicaid costs for prenatal, delivery and first year of infant care for every $1 spent on the program. 

More important, Hickenlooper said, the initiative “has helped thousands of young Colorado women continue their education, pursue their professional goals and postpone pregnancy until they are ready to start a family.”

But wait, according to the conservatives the best way to avoid teen pregnancy is by keeping sex ed out of public school classroom, get rid of Planned Parenthood, and dress your daughters like puritans?

So gee simply educating both teen boys and teen girls about sex and providing access to birth control can bring teen pregnancy rates down by almost half, and allow young women to live full and productive lives while choosing parenthood on THEIR terms.

Whoda thunk it?

Canadian teenager fights, and wins, to have a "sexual purity" course taught by conservative Christians removed from her school's curriculum.

Courtesy of Think Progress:

 After a Canadian high school student filed a human rights complaint against her school district, saying that her rights as a nonbeliever were violated by being required to attend a course on sexual purity taught by a conservative Christian group, school officials agreed to reconsider the curriculum. The anti-abortion group that taught that abstinence education course, Pregnancy Care Centre, won’t be invited back next year. 

Emily Dawson and her mother, Kathy, lodged a formal complaint with the Alberta Human Rights Commission after Emily was required to attend a two-day abstinence class in order to graduate. The complaint alleges that the Pregnancy Care Centre’s course used scare tactics, like misleading information about STDs and negative stereotypes about single parent homes, to dissuade students from having sex. The Dawsons identify as agnostics and were offended that they had no option to opt out of a course taught by a conservative religious organization with an explicit agenda. 

Now, thanks to the public backlash sparked by their allegations, Emily’s school district is looking for new speakers to cover topics related to sex ed. 

“We’ve heard a lot of concerns expressed from the public over the last several days about guest speakers invited to present on the topic of sexual health education,” the board wrote in a statement released Friday. “We are asking our schools in the fall to use different presenters so that we can continue this conversation, and focus on meeting the needs of students and parents.”

Well good for Emily! That is incredibly brave of her to fight for her right not to be exposed to religious indoctrination and misinformation is her classroom.

How the school did not know realize that the America based anti-abortion, pro-abstinence group would be selling their children slut shaming snake oil is a little beyond me.

The Pregnancy Care Centre is affiliated with a network of right-wing “crisis pregnancy centers” in the United States called Care-Net. Both groups are opposed to abortion and advocate for sexual abstinence until marriage. In an interview with CBC News, a researcher at the Sex Information and Education Council of Canada said it’s somewhat surprising that a Canadian public school would use a sexual health curriculum from a U.S. group, since Canada has been “far ahead of the U.S. when it comes to teaching about sexual health free of ideology or religion.”

Yeah America has a history of outsourcing our religious zealotry to other countries. Just look what we have done in Uganda.

School principal discourages female student from reporting sexual assault for fear of damaging star athlete's future. Athlete victimizes second student weeks later.

Courtesy of Alternet:

Last week the National Women’s Law Center, along with a local law firm in Michigan filed a complaint in federal district court on behalf a high school student who was sexually assaulted at school by a fellow student and star basketball player. In many ways the story echoes the tragic high school rape story from Steubenville, Ohio,which should lead all of us to ask just what kind of culture are we raising our children in, and what kind of culture is being cultivated at our high schools? 

According to the complaint, in 2010 the victim was sexually assaulted by a star player on the school’s basketball team. The assault took place on campus in a sound proof band room at Forest Hills Central High School. The victim notified a teacher who in turn reported the assault to the principal. But rather than open an investigation into the allegations, the principal discouraged the student and her parents from filing charges, telling them that doing so could ruin the assailant’s prospects at being recruited to play basketball for a Division 1 school. 

The victim and her parents ignored the principal’s request not to file charges because they were concerned that this student might attack other girls. Instead, the student and her parents filed a police report, and the Kent County Sheriff’s Department began a criminal investigation. Meanwhile, the school did nothing. 

As alleged in the complaint, two weeks later another female student was sexually assaulted by the same attacker. Despite a legal obligation under Title IX to investigate the assault and protect the student, the high school officials never interviewed the girl or her parents again, failed to conduct an investigation, and for two and a half weeks left the attacker in one of her classes. 

It gets worse. As word of the sexual assault spread among the student body, the female victim became the target of an intensive cyber-bullying and harassment campaign—both at school and online—that depicted her as a liar and a “whore” who was trying to bring down an innocent athlete. These cyber-attacks were only reinforced by the fact that the school continued to take no action to reprimand the male student. Not only did fellow students harass the victim, the attacker and his friends verbally and physically harassed the girl as well. They followed her around as she moved in and out of classrooms, through hallways, and around the school campus. The attacker sometimes pushed her into other students as she walked down the hallway, causing her to slam into lockers. Despite repeated efforts by the victim’s parents and other students to alert the principal and the school’s Title IX Coordinator about the viciousness of the harassment by the attacker and other students, school administrators took no action.

As I mentioned after reporting about Steubenville, this kind of thing happens every day, all over the world. And it is rarely reported for the same reasons that you see listed above.

When they come forward the victims are, even today, often blamed for the assault or accused of lying about the assault.  And with access to social media it is even worse today.

In my opinion this principal should be removed from the school and forbidden to work as an educator for the rest of his life. His decision to protect the male athlete, allowing him to victimize another student, is unconscionable.

It seems this principal would have simply let the young man finish school and move on to college where he could then sexually assault even more young women without interruption.