We have just learned from a United Nations’ report that Britain is the worst place in the developed world in which to be a child. This shocking state of affairs, however, can be of little surprise to many people in this country, especially those who have witnessed successive governments undermining the family and taking away its authority and basic rights.

One of the worst examples of this destructive intervention in family life is the sex education system that has been imposed on schools. Under this system so-called sexual health officials go into classrooms and are now encouraging children as young as 12 years old to have sex. This is not only destroying childhood innocence but has given Britain the worst sexual health in the western world and the most one-parent families.

Parents in the dark

Not very long ago the Daily Telegraph ran a whole-page story headlined, Outrage over explicit sex lessons. Education correspondent John Clare described parents’ anger at 12-year-old children being given explicit sex lessons. In these lessons they were taught sodomy, oral sex with reference to “blow jobs” and mutual masturbation.

After carefully investigating the matter John Clare said he had come to three stark conclusions: “First the use of these crude and explicit materials is apparently widespread. Second, the school has not told parents precisely what their 12 year olds are being taught. And third, parents everywhere have virtually no hope of discovering the content of their children’s sex education lessons.”

The only information parents are to be given -- under government guidelines -- is the banal statement: “Students learn about forming and keeping positive relationships, how healthy bodies and healthy minds equal healthy lives...” This policy of secrecy, of keeping parents in the dark about what their children are being taught about sex and the sexual activity that is being encouraged, has proved disastrous for many children and their families.

A tragic case

One of the saddest cases I remember covering as a journalist was that of a mother whose daughter was given contraceptive pills without her knowledge. The mother only found out about it one day when she was cleaning her daughter’s bedroom and discovered the pills. She immediately rang the family planning organization that had prescribed them and was told it was none of her business. By law she had no right to know about her daughter being put on the pill. By law she could do nothing about it. And that was the end of the matter.

The mother tried to explain to them that her daughter had a medical condition which, according to the pill manufacturer’s guidelines, meant she should not be taking that medication. But they insisted the daughter was under their medical care, that the decision was hers and had nothing to do with her mother. The mother later learned from her daughter that she was having sex with a 19-year-old boy. The local family planning organization had considered this to be a “stable” relationship and a reason for her to be put her on the pill.

Tragically, the girl soon afterwards suffered a massive stroke, which the leading consultant put down to her being wrongly prescribed the pill. The boy, for whom she began taking the pill, did not want to know her after her illness or have anything to do with her. He didn’t even go to see her in hospital. And neither did the doctors who had put her on the pill.

Safe sex myth

For years the number of teenage pregnancies in Britain has been the worst in Western Europe and the government’s response and that of the family planning organizations has always been the same: more sex education for ever younger children. The amazing thing is that sex with a minor has always been a criminal offence. But it would appear that putting 12-year-olds on the pill, giving them condoms and encouraging them to have sex is not considered by the government a criminal offence any more. Some family planners say that girls as young as nine should be put on the pill.

The great myth that has been propagated by the sex education policy is that of safe sex – the notion that people won’t contract sexual diseases if a condom is used. That is false. It is an accepted medical fact that condoms afford at best only limited protection against human papilloma virus (HPV). This is the virus which causes more than 90 per cent of cervical cancer cases and is killing more women than the AIDS (HIV) virus.

Against AIDS itself, condoms provide only partial protection. This is why there is an HIV time bomb in our midst. It is why cases of sexual diseases such as syphilis gonorrhoea and chlamydia have gone through the roof and why there is a sexual disease crisis the government doesn’t want to talk about.

'State-sponsored sexual abuse of children'

To all reasonable people it is obvious that the sexual disaster in Britain is a result of instructing the young in sex without any moral code or guidelines as if it were another leisure activity. Cardinal Keith O'Brien of Edinburgh recently described Scotland's proposed health education strategy as "state-sponsored sexual abuse of children". This was in response to a project by the government-financed Family Planning Association. It was series of "sexual health education" booklets aimed at 13- to 16-year-olds which contained, the church leader said, "the most disgusting and perverted descriptions and pictures of sexual intercourse, masturbation, homosexual practices and contraceptives and abortion".

Now another government-funded agency, the Brook Advisory Centres, has launched a "Schools Sex Manual", subtitled "Nice Girls have Sex". There is also a full colour booklet (no expense spared when it comes to taxpayers’ money) for 13-year-olds called "The Good Grope Guide". Is it any wonder that underage sex, childhood pregnancy and child abortion continue to increase under this British government?

A lesson from history

Some who have made a close study of government policy are convinced that sex education has a more sinister motive. They believe its real aim is the destruction of Christian morality and the family.

The history of the movement suggests as much. The first sex education programme in the world was introduced by Georg Lukacs during the Hungarian Bolshevik regime of 1919. Lukacs, the deputy commissar for culture, wanted the "annihilation of the old values" and "the revolutionary destruction of society". To bring this about he ordered that children should be instructed in sexual intercourse and free love, be told how outdated marriage was, and be encouraged to disagree with their parents and their old-fashioned morality.

Brock Chisholm, the Canadian doctor who became Director-General of the World Health Organisation, decreed that children should be freed from national, religious and other cultural prejudices inflicted on them by their parents. He advocated that classroom sex education should be introduced, “eliminating the ways of the elders by force if necessary.” As Valerie Riches has noted in Sex Education or Indoctrination? another like-minded American family planner, Mary Calderone, called for “liberating children from their families” and “abolishing the family as we know it”.

In the same tradition, apparently, the British Health Education Authority and contraceptive dispensers such as the Brook Advisory Centres are bitterly opposed to parents having any rights with regard to their children’s sex education.

It is high time parents hit back and insisted on knowing what is being taught their children in secret and behind their backs. And let’s give children back their innocence.

William Keenan is a British journalist who formerly wrote for the Daily Mirror.