According to recent guidelines set by the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) in a report entitled, “International Technical Guidance on Sexuality Education,” “It is never too early to start talking to children about sexual matters.”
According to the report, “Preparing young children and young people for the transition to adulthood has always been one of humanity’s great challenges, with human sexuality and relationships at its core. Today, in a world with AIDS, how we meet this challenge is our most important opportunity in breaking the trajectory of the epidemic.”
The report goes on to say that “inadequate preparation leaves [children] vulnerable,” and encourages parents to teach their children about sexuality from birth.
Partnering with the Sexuality Information and Education Council of the United States (SIECUS), an arm of the Kinsey Institute, UNESCO has compromised any reputation it may have had as an independent and reputable organization.
The Kinsey Institute was founded by sexologist Alfred Kinsey, who studied human sexual behaviors in the 1940s and 1950s. Kinsey has been accused of promoting pedophilia, citing his research that documented adults helping to bring children and infants to orgasm. The Kinsey Institute created SIECUS in 1964, an organization that received $1.6 million in federal funding between 2002 and 2009.
UNESCO admits that many of the new controversial guidelines were authored by a former director of SEICUS.
UNESCO’s newest guidelines introduced in September of last year faced heavy opposition as they suggested promoting legal abortion and masturbation for children as young as five. Though the opposition was strong enough to force the organization to withdraw its guidelines, similar ones were quietly introduced last December.
While the guidelines have been dubbed “a model of age-appropriate sex education,” UN members staunchly opposed them last week.
Likewise, in promoting the teaching of sex education to extremely young children, UNESCO has drawn the ire of conservative and family organizations. One such group includes the global outreach arm of Minnesota Citizens Concerned for Life. According to the group’s director, Scott Fischbach, “The International Guidelines are mere pro-abortion propaganda that ought not to be taken seriously.”
As a result of the fierce backlash, some of the more explicit language found in the guidelines has been changed, but the majority of the controversial suggestions remain, including a sex-education curriculum for children from birth to age five. One such suggestion encourages parents to buy anatomically-correct dolls and inform their children of diverse sexual relationships.
Regarding masturbation, the curriculum writes, “If a child is touching his or her genitals in private, ignore the behavior.”
Likewise, the curriculum encourages parents to be supportive and open-minded to gender identity and sexual orientation, and discourages them from enforcing traditional gender identities: “Confusion about these issues and fear of homosexuality (homophobia) has caused many parents and other adults to limit how girls and boys express themselves.”
One curriculum asks parents to refrain from teaching children about morality, as there are no right and wrong values, while another model curriculum asks parents to address contradictions in “religious approaches and rights based approaches.”
Perhaps the most disturbing of the curricula asks parents to foster early sexual development by encouraging children to “experience genital pleasure” from birth until age 2 and by age 3, to encourage “sex play.”
The report also heavily promotes the encouragement of abortion and lists the International Planned Parenthood Federation and other abortion advocacy organizations as references.
The American Thinker notes the absurdity of the United Nations’ “solutions” to HIV, sexual abuse, and exploitation by encouraging sexuality at significantly younger ages:
More than four million girls will seek abortions every year, so don’t promote abstinence. Instead, "introduce and strengthen sexuality education." Remove the stigma against sexual activity, and then introduce worldwide programs to remove the stigma against STDs, and establish a bureaucracy to teach masturbation and contraception.
You’ve got to love the way the left spins their craziness — just cloak all the controversial stuff in lofty goals and protective rhetoric.
Photo of Irina Bokova, head of UNESCO: AP Images
