Lynette Burrows(pictured), an author on children’s rights, family campaigner and mother of six children said in October this year on the BBC's Sunday Morning Live show: “I think parents have the absolute right to protect their children from this sort of education which is so unhelpfully obsessed with destroying childhood innocence, in a way that's reminiscent of paedophilia. To me, anyone who wants to talk dirty to little children is a danger to them."Last week Mrs Burrows spoke at SPUC's Safe at School "Sex education as sexual sabotage" meeting in Westminster, after which our 47,000 strong petition against explicit sex DVDs in primary schools was presented to Michael Gove and the Department for Education by parents joined by Jonathan Evans, MP for Cardiff North, and Andrea Leadsom, MP for South Northamptonshire.
I am delighted that Mrs Burrows has allowed me to publish her talk, in full, on this blog.
Talk for SPUC on 1st December 2011 by Lynette Burrows
First of all, I want to say what a pleasure and a privilege it is to speak on the same platform as Dr. Reisman; a person that I have long admired – and quoted from, on innumerable occasions. Her courage in saying what she has – and being damned by the pundits for saying it, is a useful lesson to us all, in how any individual speaking the truth these days, and sticking to their guns, can expect to be treated. There is nobody more bigoted and hostile than a liberal whose method or opinion is questioned, and one has to be prepared to stand up to all the misrepresentation and insults they throw.
The British, though not a cowardly people, are very easy to embarrass and we often flinch from confrontation rather than ‘speaking the truth and shaming the Devil’ as the nuns who taught me used to say. I was invited to be on the panel to assess the Sex Education forum hosted by ITV in 2008 where, I think, the current crop of horribly unsuitable films were previewed to a warmly appreciative audience of teachers, educationalists, social workers etc, etc. They were graphic and ugly and the only thing that saved them being the sort of material shown by fundamentalist religious groups depicting sex as the work of the Devil was the relentlessly jokey tone and the way deeply shocking images were shown as being perfectly normal and commonplace. This is quite a marketing device actually – to normalize the circumstances surrounding what you want to sell, however counter-cultural and offensive they are to what are essentially community and family values.
I was the last of the panel to give my opinion of the films and said, in my usual kindly and inoffensive way that it reminded me of the policy of the Nigerian govt 30 years ago, when they gave out bomb-proof pills to protect the army in their civil war. ‘They didn’t work of course but hey, who cares, they were a good idea and people bought them! Not everybody died anyway. ‘Wear a condom and you’ll be safe’ – that’s all. Never mind the casualties!’ It didn’t go down well, and even worse, my opinion that the material was put together by crazed paedophiles, drunk with the freedom to talk dirty to young people.
Really, there was pandemonium – and a man stood up and said that I was a dinosaur who thought all sex was dirty even though it was perfectly normal and decent and no-one should have any inhibitions about the body because it was natural and lovely. ‘OK, I said, show us your willy then’! If it’s so normal and as un-shocking as a tattoo or a scar, show us what you are so happy to show crowds of strangers without embarrassment. You show us yours – just to demonstrate that, used as a teaching aid, it is as easy and without implication as you claim. ‘Disgraceful’, he thundered, and sat down whereupon a teacher who, she said, had brought her six-form with her, announced that she was leaving because she didn’t want her pupils to listen to such ignorant, backward rubbish. Alas for her, a tall black girl, who seemed typical of the rest of the class, said that she had never heard any other opinion upon the subject and she wanted to hear more – so she stayed and so did the class, leaving the teacher to stalk out alone with something less than authority.
These films were designed for teenagers and what was unacceptable about them as a means of instructing the young was principally their crudity, insensitivity and assumption of a hard-boiled, quasi- medical approach to human relations but, more importantly, their glossing over important facts such as the failure-rate of all contraceptives, particularly among the young, but also with adult, married couples and the risk involved in promiscuous sex for young people. Sexually transmitted infections (STIs) were always referred to as being ‘treatable’ despite many of them being, in fact, incurable – an old trick that is invariably used by the media particularly the BBC.
The reality of treatment that goes on for years, or all your life, is never spelled out for them; nor the fact that even the Romans had treatment, in the form of herbs, potions and carrying a rabbit’s foot in your pocket – but the disease itself was not cured. It’s true they now have a vaccine that targets two of the most common forms of HPV – but there are other strains of the disease which it doesn’t touch. What about if you encounter one of those?
I cannot see the current sex education programme as being anything but ‘marketing’. Never mind the pious talk of ‘only if you want to do it’, the reality is that they fixate on sex as a way of selling it and grooming young people to be sexually active from as early as possible. As long ago as 1975 the Monopolies Commission reported that the Family Planning Assocation's (FPA) educational activities had ‘widened the market for contraceptives’. You bet they have – otherwise they would have been abandoned long ago.
They are still involved in probably most of the sex-education in schools and have managed to put up the number of illegitimate children born to young mothers enormously. In the reign of Elizabeth I in the sixteenth century until the accession of Elizabeth XI in the twentieth century the illegitimacy rate was more or less stable at 10%. Once the FPA got access to young people, that changed and we now have an illegitimacy rate that is not far off 50% and still rising.
The rather remarkable thing is that all their tendentious advice is given with the one prescriptive proviso that, should they catch an STI, they must not sleep with anyone else until they are considered safe. This is the first and only mention of the fact that it is possible to be abstinent when it comes to sex. Apart from this one instant, young people are supposed to be like rabbits, instinctively programmed to copulate most of the time.
It seems a bit strange to me that they should consider young people altruistic enough to abstain only for the sake of protecting others and not themselves! Talk about shutting the stable door after the horse has bolted.
The subject of sex education for primary schools is another ball-game, as they say. I do believe that all ‘sex-education’ as practiced today is wicked because it has, in terms of human misery, an unacceptable number of casualties. All of which can be re- used as further propaganda for the necessity of their product.
With little children, however, we are on holy ground and Christ Himself warned that those who lead children astray would deserve hideous punishment. ‘Better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck and he were drowned in the depth of the sea’. We often refer to protecting their innocence – but what do we mean by it? Is innocence simply the absence of useful information; is it simply not knowing something or other?
I don’t think so. I think it is something much more vital and akin to a mental immune system that operates in young children for as long as they need it for their growth and development and for the protection of their mental well-being. I don’t believe they can grow up healthily without certain areas that they have not got the emotional maturity to understand or deal with, being veiled from them.
In fact, the filtering out of pre-mature information is intrinsic to the child and does not have to be enforced. Children just don’t notice things that they don’t understand; it doesn’t register with them - as has often been noted in the millions of children that used to share a bedroom with their parents when there was no other space available or, as in the Old Testament, they were all tent dwellers. Children made their own privacy around them that mere events couldn’t penetrate.
To force sex-ed on to them, before they are ready is therefore to enact mental violence on them for some theoretical reason that is far closer to paedophilia than anything else. We see the beginning of the theory, I think, in the 1970 booklet, recommended by the FPA, Boy, Girl, Man, Woman in which paedophiles were described as ‘enticers’. Here is the quote: ‘Enticers are kindly people who treat children tenderly and affectionately’. The writer went on to suggest the ‘the child’s natural sexual curiosity may find an outlet in the company of paedophiles’.
So here we have the theory laid out for public approval. Since sexual curiosity is natural to a child therefore it is alright to allow adults, who have another agenda entirely, to have sexual access to educate them in it. They say, and they are experts, that children need a ‘sexual outlet’ and they are the people to facilitate satisfying this ‘natural’ need. Most people recoil in horror from such a suggestion – and they are right. But the fact is that the material produced now for the innocent eyes of young children is doing just that.
Of course all parents know the fascination that the body holds for little children. The fact that not only rude noises, but pee and poo is produced from within themselves and without their direct control, is very fascinating to them and the source of much innocent humour. But this is a healthy interest in their bodily functions which is not coprophilia, or any other perversion, and any attempt to emphasize and educate a child in it, would rightly be considered child-abuse.
So, I stand by my original opinion that the increase in talking graphically about sex to young children is essentially paedophilic in nature. It is increasing the number of people who are allowed to ‘talk dirty’ to children, and so to breach the protective armour of their innocence. Thus it is widening the scope for paedophiles to target children. Warning children with slimy, disclaimers about ‘inappropriate touching’, is simply token and meaningless to a child. How can they recognize the danger signals from those who wish to exploit them if such a large number of adults are implicated in the same ‘dirty talk’’?
To me, the shamelessness of showing children graphic sex should act as a warning signal to us to beware of the adults who provide it. They are either a danger to children themselves or, more likely, are too stupid to see the danger inherent in demolishing the taboo that protects children from predators.
We now know, how the attitude of the FPA in 1970 helped to make respectable the whole idea of paedophile ‘enticers’ that culminated in the National Council for Civil Liberties, with two later cabinet Ministers in the Labour Government on the board, inviting two openly paedophile groups to affiliate to them later in the 1970s as examples of minority rights. We also know that it gave rise to what a police chief described as the ‘staggering scale’ of paedophilia in children’s homes in the 1970s where, according to the North Wales Tribunal of Enquiry in 1997, twelve boys had committed suicide over a twenty two year period, in order to escape their paedophile tormentors.
Schools and churches of many different faiths produced far fewer numbers of men who acted upon this theory of benign enticers, but they have got all the publicity in the last few years. The scandal of the previous two decades have been expunged from the public mind. Once homosexuals had set their sights on gaining full equality in civil society - even subverting the institution of marriage itself - those in the media would never permit any hint of this dark history to appear in any programmes or discussions.
That vile theory has now gone, buried so deep that no-one ever refers to it or the reason why so much of the ‘child abuse’ now featured in our newspapers, occurred during the 1970’s, even though it definitely calls for explanation or, at least, comment. But, the Devil never sleeps and this latest manifestation of a cruel desire to deprive children of something natural and wholesome has reappeared in another form.
Fortunately, this government has re-stated parents’ right to withdraw their children from sex-education but many schools are used to by-passing or ignoring pesky parents. Parents have every right to know what material the school proposes to use and to watch it in advance. They must exercise their rights and churches, of every denomination, should act themselves to view the material, to warn parents and inform them of their rights. Personally, I would withdraw my children from any class described as being about ‘sex-education’. They don’t need it and parents can supply all they need to know from their knowledge of the child, from their own instincts and in the context of their family.
I have never believed the oft-repeated propaganda from the ‘sexualizers’ that ordinary families are incapable of talking to their children about the facts of life. They have managed it alright throughout all the ages - long before the Family Planning Association appeared as a tool for selling something they could simultaneously make both irresistible and beneficial. The increase in everything sexually damaging to young people can be fairly placed at their door and not at the doors of ordinary people; who though aware of the danger to their children of drug-pushers, pimps and crooks, do not expect harm to come to them via the classroom. The so-called sexualization of children is a modish, current cause for concern, deplored by many, including in government – they should face the reality that by far the worst aspect of it begins and is continued under our noses in our schools.
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