Ms Deirdre Seery:

Sex education is one of my big topics. The Cork Sexual Health Centre has been doing sex education in partnership with teachers and schools since we changed from pure HIV education to sex education in 1997. We did that on foot of research which we carried out in Berlin and the Netherlands to see what they were doing there. To get evidence from our own schoolchildren in Cork, we also had a questionnaire for 800 young people. In the Netherlands at that time, they were planning to mainstream it so that teachers would be providing all the sex education. We thought that was fair enough. However, according to people in Germany and the Netherlands, they realised that a partnership approach to sex education is where it is at now. That is largely because young people in school are so influenced by what they see on the internet and in the porn industry via the internet. Sexual practice norms have been influenced by people accessing misinformation. I will not talk here about the kind of information that young people are getting from porn sites which they regard as normal, but it is scary. They need people like us - not me in particular, but those from our organisation - to be able to address these issues and free the teacher up to talk about the other core values around good sexual practices, such as respect, listening, talking - all of those kinds of things - without having to deal with the actual sexual practices that have become norms. We have to challenge those practices and say they are not norms.