Labour MP for South Derbyshire, Samantha Niblett, has launched a campaign called ‘Summer of Sex’. The campaign slogan — ‘Yes sex please, we’re British’ — is designed to prompt a ‘national conversation’ about the need for ‘open, inclusive, lifelong, sex education’. Alarmingly, her campaign promotes a debased, individualistic, view of human sexuality which she wishes to inflict upon children, as well as adults.
Niblett is working with Cindy Gallop, a ‘sex tech entrepreneur’, who has developed a website called MakeLoveNotPorn, which, according to Politics Home, is attempting to normalise pornography by getting real people and couples to send in their self-produced videos. Niblett remarks in relation to its content:
“real people who are having messy, funny, intimate, sensual sex together”.
“The sections that I always prefer the most are the intimate sections. I am not saying that anybody else’s preferences are wrong, but I think if you’re desensitised to think that some things are normal, it skews your view about what real sex is like with real people who are not acting in a porn film.”
If the campaign was purely focused on morally-vacuous exhibitionism between adults that would be sufficiently grotesque, but the ‘summer of sex’ campaign is likely to lead to an increase in underage sexual experimentation through the inclusion of ‘pleasure-focused’ sex education in schools. Niblett continues:
“The first time I remember seeing pornography, I was 10, I saw it on a videotape, I saw it in magazines,” she said.
“And I sometimes wonder, having seen it so young but without being able to talk about it, whether that has shaped the person that I am today. It’s funny, just because I’m doing a campaign on sex education, it’s not because I’m this massively empowered, sexually flamboyant person. I’m not. I wish I were.
“If I could rewire my brain… It’s not too late, I’m hoping that, actually, this summer of sex is also an education for me.”
She described how the sex education she had at school was “pretty medical”.
“It was all focused on what you shouldn’t do, not what you should do,” she continued.
“Pleasure certainly didn’t play a part in it. And as a girl, you’re just worried about either getting an STD or getting pregnant. I don’t remember talking about contraception much either.”
Niblett implies that viewing pornography at the age of 10 is normal providing children are able to discuss what they see openly, and suggesting that the only problem with her own experience was not living in an environment conducive to becoming ‘sexually flamboyant.’ Given that the age of consent is 16 in the UK, most parents would argue that 10-year-olds do not have sufficient maturity to view pornography without it having a harmful effect on their psycho-sexual development.
Secondly, she strongly suggests that sex education in school should move away from factual, ‘medical’ information towards a more ‘pleasure’ focused approach. It is an alarming prospect that teachers or guest speakers in schools could be making children in their care aware of the ways in which sexual activity, which they are too young to safely undertake, can be pleasurable for them. Previously, discussions about sex were highly regulated between children and teachers, which protected children from harm and ensured the professional relationship between teachers and students remained appropriate. What Niblett is doing takes us dangerously into the sphere of grooming children for early sexual experimentation.
The bottom line is that the ‘summer of sex’ campaign promotes a disturbingly simplistic and animalistic view of human sexuality – one in which marriage, love and children are missing from the discussion. Crucially, Niblett’s campaign focuses on school children and their lack of education about sexual ‘pleasure.’ This is deeply troubling – essentially to promote to children the idea of sex as a leisure activity without consequence. The recent explosion of peer-on-peer sex abuse in schools is well documented. Data from police forces in England and Wales between 2019 and 2022 revealed:
- A 40% increase in reports of sexual assaults and rapes where both the alleged victim and perpetrator were under 18.
- More than 2,700 recorded incidents took place on school property in 2022.
According to the UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA), the rates of STIs have also recently risen dramatically in recent years. In 2023 there were 401,800 diagnoses of new STIs, an increase of 4.7% since 2022 (383,789).
There is therefore no evidence that this kind of value-free sex education, which has now been prevalent in schools for decades, has been anything other than counterproductive. A campaign that encourages early sexual experimentation and further separates sex from marriage will exacerbate these problems, make our schools less safe, and not achieve anything other than diminish the lives and prospects of our children.
ParentPower Team
