Dr. Maggie Brennan:

One of the proposals in the Green Paper is that the sex and relationships education provision in the UK curriculum be extended in order that relationships and sexual education courses are provided in every school in the UK.

One of the proposals in the Green Paper is that this would encompass awareness-raising and education specifically around how to conduct sexual relationships and other forms of relationships in the online space. It is a neat proposal and we would welcome it. It is very sensible in the context of what happens when one goes into schools and talks to children about the kinds of problems they are facing, the sorts of issues that arise around self-generation of sexual images, and what happens for children when they lose control of those images. There is a whole series of new educational messages to be relayed to children around consent and what it means to share a sexual image as opposed to consent to a sexual act, because that is a permanent record of the act and there is potential for exploitation and abuse. There is also a whole series of new messages to be delivered to children around boundaries, what it means to establish a relationship boundary in the online space and how to respect another person's privacy. While we welcome the suggestion that sex and relationships education within schools would begin to encompass those online issues, which are distinct from the ones that existed previously, we would like to see better specification of what would be provided for in the curriculum, and the Green Paper was scant on that.