Kids Get Lessons on Explicit Sex

Insight on the News, July 19, 1999 by Kelly Patricia O'Meara

Public schools and local libraries increasingly have been choosing to make available to children graphic and sexually explicit books that barely can be described in this magazine.

Picture your adolescent browsing through the school library. Other than home, it's the one place parents may feel sure their children are likely to be protected from pornography, obscenity, perversion and other vulgarity. But are they?

Innocently scanning the school-library shelves a child chooses It's Perfectly Normal, a book about sex and reproduction by Robie Harris. Flipping through the pages, young readers might immediately be attracted to the drawings of adolescents like themselves, touching their private parts. Naturally, their curiosity aroused, they begin to read soothing words normalizing things younger readers may never have heard of or even understand. For example, "Masturbation is touching or rubbing any of your body's sex organs for pleasure -- because it feels good. One everyday term for masturbating is 'playing with yourself.' A girl often rubs her clitoris; a boy often rubs his penis."

It's Perfectly Normal now is considered by national library authorities to be appropriate for children in elementary school. Of a total of 89 pages, 30 present drawings with explicit genital detail; one illustrates kids masturbating while another shows a boy in a classroom with an erection under his clothes. Because of such graphic and explicit material, a growing number of parents are challenging the appropriateness of books such as this for the age group at which they are directed.

Indeed, compared to other books that schools and local libraries throughout the United States are making available to young children, It's Perfectly Normal is considered tame. Critics say the problem with such books is not only that they are made available to a very young group without parental consultation, but also that when parents express disapproval they find themselves belittled, ignored or attacked as ignorant censors.

Karen Gounaud, a mother of two grown children and several foster children, is president of Family Friendly Libraries, a Virginia-based advisory organization for parents and professionals looking for information and advice about explicit materials in schools and libraries that are age-inappropriate. Gounaud regularly receives letters from parents concerned about books their children have picked up in libraries -- books such as It's Perfectly Normal -- and who are concerned that availability of such materials to grammar-school children might already have become the norm in school libraries across the country.

"They're targeted for elementary-age children," says Gounaud, "and routinely put in the children's section -- often in the picture-books section, making them accessible to very young children. This book provides a great deal of information about masturbation, sex, homosexuality, abortion, artificial insemination and even in-vitro fertilization, yet the word 'marriage' doesn't appear even once. And despite such detail there is little or no information about the responsibilities that go along with sex -- let alone marriage."

Books that receive the most criticism from parents are part of the Accelerated Readers Program, or ARP, common in elementary and middle schools. It is supposed to get children interested in reading and help them develop reading skills for a lifetime. Another is the Advanced Placement Program in high schools, specifically to take the advanced-placement reading test to earn college credit. Books are chosen by librarians, teachers and administrators in each school district from a list that includes many books recommended by the American Library Association, or ALA. The ALA recommends hundreds of books, and the Advanced Placement Program divides them into two categories, Classics and Contemporary. Teachers choose the books from the list -- usually the contemporary topics -- then test pupil understanding of the material.

Gounaud says "90 percent of all complaints we receive from parents are from those of middle- and high-school students participating in the Advanced Placement Program." She adds, "A great number of the Contemporary books deal with the occult or explicit sexual material, vulgarity and profanity." Typical of some of the materials that some parents find offensive is the following excerpt from The Color Purple by Alice Walker:

"First he put his thing up against my hip and sort of wiggled it around. Then he grab hold my titties. Then he push his thing inside my pussy. Listen, she say, right down there in your pussy is a little button that gits real hot when you do you know what with somebody. It git hotter and hotter an then it melt. Lot of sucking go on, here and there, she say, lot of finger and tongue work...."

Eric Buehrer, president of Gateways to Better Education, a California-based organization working to help Christian parents be as sure as possible that their children in public schools will not be undermined spiritually, mentally or academically, wonders "if this is the most noble literature we can give our children." Buehrer respects the First Amendment and understands concerns raised about censorship but says, "Just because a book is written and published doesn't mean a school has to buy it. After all, it is public dollars that buy the books, so parents should have some say in which books are chosen." Buehrer compares today's public-school system to the breakup of Ma Bell, saying public schools have "been compulsory and publicly funded, but they also may be looking at a big breakup." He adds, "Let's be honest: Most schools have codes of ethics -- behavior that is and is not acceptable and that all students must adhere to. If a child reads one of these passages and then goes into the hall and repeats the obscenities, they are most likely going to be in deep trouble." Obviously it is not a violation of the First Amendment right of free speech to prohibit children and others from using sexually explicit profanity in a school.