The Argument For Adding Consent To The Sex-Ed Curriculum
American Federation Of Teachers president says consent is "as important as anything else" in conversations about sex.
In an age when young people remain divided over what really constitutes consent, one in four college women will report a rape or attempted rape in their lifetime. American Federation of Teachers president Randi Weingarten told HuffPost Live on Thursday how she would tackle the problem: require high school students to learn about consent in sex-ed courses before college.
"What we need to do is bake into [sex-ed] the whole issue about date violence, about consent, and not just put it on the person who could be assaulted," Weingarten told HuffPost Live's Caroline Modarressy-Tehrani. "But this kind of education needs to be directed to young men as well as young women. So we should put this into sex-ed courses -- again, age appropriate, whether they are in middle school or high school."
Weingarten pointed to a Senate bill that would require sexual assault education for high-schoolers as one way to "make sure that kids know the issue about consent is as important [as] anything else when you talk about reproductive rights, and when you talk about biology and all sorts of other things."
Watch experts discuss the need for consent to be incorporated into sex-ed in the video above, and click here for the full conversation questioning if sex-ed can end campus rape.
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