Can we at least try talking to young people about sex?

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/sep/06/young-people-sex-sajid-javid-universities

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“I just hate to think my daughter is sitting there,” Sajid Javid told the Sunday Times, “reading on the news or watching television and thinking, ‘I don’t want to go to university because I might be assaulted.’” The tendency to become interested in violence against women only when you can conceive of it affecting your own daughter has its own tang of sexism. Specifically, it’s an inward-looking paternalism in which a woman’s safety has less to do with her own empowerment than it has to do with society collectively deciding to parent her.

Related: 10 things female students shouldn’t have to go through at university

But parking that, what exactly would the school-age Ms Javid see on the news? There is not very much systematic collection of data on sexual harassment at universities. What we have instead is a stream of bizarre cultural moments: students in Nottingham chanting about necrophilia; sports clubs from Durham and Aberystwyth peddling rape jokes; female freshers being pressured into degrading situations as the price of “initiation” into college life; students in a Glasgow debating society answering rational argument with “frigid bitch”. (Most of these examples, and many others, were compiled by Laura Bates’s Everyday Sexism project.)

I’m trying to piece back together the 1990s: what I, as a student, would have said if someone had called me frigid when I was trying to have an argument about religion. I wouldn’t have even been insulted; I’d have been gobsmacked by the lack of sophistication. There is a new nastiness to all these jokes that is high-pitched and insistent. Intermittently, some tragedy will happen that underscores just how mirthless this “irony” is. Hannah Stubbs, a student at Keele, took her own life last weekend. Another student had allegedly raped her in March.

On Sunday, Radio 5 Live revealed the unsurprising finding that this problem doesn’t start when people hit 18: there were 5,500 allegations of sexual offences made by schoolchildren, including 600 accusations of rape, over the past three years. There is, at the very least, broad consensus that this situation is wrong, and that it has worsened.

Anecdotally, professionals in schools and criminal justice blame the prevalence of porn

Javid wants a parliamentary inquiry, leading to a task force, leading to new ideas, possibly legislation that could, depending on what that legislation was, bring the UK into line with the US. It’s a curious nation to choose as a role model, with one in five American women subjected to an attempted or completed sexual assault while at college. But it’s also a disordered proposal, to look to the law for answers before achieving any profound understanding of the problem. Sexual assault, harassment, revenge porn, rape, stalking – these things are already illegal. Low conviction rates deter reporting and undermine the process, but you don’t solve that by concocting new laws, and nor do you change a culture of aggressive sexism by dreaming up ways to stop that aggression finding its expression.

The authoritarian-lite position is to put one’s faith in more education. The campaign to put consent on the national curriculum has been running for some time, and I’ve agreed with it, while at the same time thinking of the point made by the prosecuting lawyer at the trial of Lynndie England, court martialled in 2005 for prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib. The army admitted England had had insufficient training. And yet, to know that it was wrong, piling grown men naked and laughing at them: how much training does a soldier need? While the fact that no means no can never be said too often, how much education do people need to treat one another as equals, to respect one another’s wishes, to favour mutual pleasure over exploitation?

How did it become normal, over a couple of decades, for sex to descend, even jokingly, into a process where young men are a marauding army and young women hoodwinked and used instrumentally?

Related: Wave of school sex abuse by pupils reported

Anecdotally, professionals in schools and criminal justice blame the prevalence of porn: if we accept that it’s everywhere, we need to spread more assiduously the message that normal sex isn’t defined by violence. There is a growing argument – distilled by the science writer Gary Wilson – that mainstream pornography does more than map toxic behaviour to people who don’t have much else to navigate by; that it actively depletes empathy and interrupts the bonds of intimacy. There’s a line too that this scornful misogyny is merely the sexual component of a broader possessive individualism. In a world where people are defined by their ability to consume, all relationships are transactional.

I am intermittently persuaded by both hypotheses but am struck, always, by how little emphasis there is anywhere in actually talking to this generation. Not teaching or persuading them, not threatening them with legal action or banning happy hour, but asking directly what their beliefs and attitudes to one another are. The debate as it stands is trying to devise solutions that can be applied to a generation like an ointment. Whether characterised as victims or perpetrators, the young are treated as bystanders to their own improvement. The perverse consequence of worrying that they grow up too fast, sexually – because of the internet or the modern world – is that we infantilise young people politically, dismissing or simply ignoring their capacity for active citizenship. In fact, the only thing that could conceivably change the tide would be the politicisation – the civic engagement, the movement-building, the feminism – of the people who make up the ocean.