Arnold Schwarzenegger in “Kindergarten Cop”

WND EXCLUSIVE

ACTIVISTS: SCHOOLS MUST TEACH SEX CONSENT TO KINDERGARTNERS

Students must learn to 'keep hands to themselves'

Leo Hohmann

Fresh off a victory in getting a law passed that regulates sexual encounters between students on college campuses, feminist activists in California are now pushing for instruction on sexual “consent” for children starting in kindergarten.

An activist group called Take Back the Night has joined with others to issue a set of “demands” to California colleges and public schools that it believes will help roll back “a culture of rape” on campuses.

“We recommend consent education in K-12,” the group said on its Facebook page. “College is too late for people to learn about bodily autonomy and respect.”

Those signing the demand for sexual consent education starting in kindergarten include student activists such as Sofie Karasek, co-founder of End-Rape on Campus at University of California Berkeley, and like-minded students at University of California Santa Barbara and San Diego State University.

Alejandra Melgoza, the Take Back the Night coordinator at U.C. Santa Barbara, told Huffington Post that consent education should include teaching students to keep their hands to themselves.

“Concerned parents might think we’re talking about consent in a purely sexual context, when really we’re talking on a day-to-day basis,” Melgoza told the website.

Warner, director of Associated Students of the University of California Sexual Assault Commission, told HuffPo that consent was not “just for intercourse.”

“It’s for all aspects of our lives, and people aren’t understanding or being taught that,” she said.

In August, the California Legislature passed Senate Bill 967, also called the “affirmative consent” or “yes means yes” law, which was signed into law by Gov. Jerry Brown. This made California the first state to ditch the traditional legal standard for determining whether a rape occurred – “no means no” – and replacing it with the more aggressive “yes means yes” standard on college campuses. The new standard would not hold up in a criminal court, but can result in a student getting convicted by a campus tribunal and being kicked out of school or losing scholarships.

Critics of the “yes means yes” law argue that, absent a written consent, such as a text message or ink on paper, it would be virtually impossible for a man to fend off a false accusation of rape.

To avoid confusion later on, children must be educated in the finer points of consenting to sexual acts in grammar school and even earlier, proponents of the law now contend. That’s cause for concern among pro-family advocates who believe children should not be taught about sexual touching by public-school teachers in second or third grade, let alone kindergarten.

David Usher, president of the Center for Marriage Policy, is among those who are troubled by the latest demands by feminist activists.

“They are trying to plant a notion that a kindergartener could consent to sexual relations. They will deny that, but that is what they want,” Usher said. “The idea that a kindergartener could consent, or can consent, to a sexual relationship and needs to be taught about how to do that as a kindergartener, that is (Alfred) Kinsey on steroids.”

Dianna Thompson

Also concerned about the new law, and the feminists’ plans to promote it in the schools, is Dianna Thompson, who testified against the “yes means yes” bill as director of Washington, D.C.-based Stop Abuse for Everyone, as reported previously by WND.

She is also considered an expert on family and divorce issues, having worked as a consultant for 25 years.

“I didn’t like the idea of ‘yes means yes’ to begin with. I thought the language in the bill was vague and ambiguous and over-broad and was going to make many unsuspecting young men have a problem where no problem existed,” Thompson told WND.

The U.S. Department of Justice reported that the rate of sexual violence cases reported against female Americans age 12 and up from 1995 to 2005 declined 64 percent. And that rate remained unchanged from 2005 to 2010.

“So, again, where is this ‘rape culture’ coming from when we have the U.S. Justice Department saying it is declining? How do you explain why we have these bills where you’re guilty until proven innocent, if you can even prove your innocence in this?” she asked.

Thompson said children need to be trained, at home, about moral issues.

“And we already do teach young children about this. It’s called right and wrong, and that’s what us parents teach our kids,” she said. “Why are we going to be teaching our children about issues they are not even supposed to be concerned about at that age? I think these issues aren’t even something that’s on young children’s radar. It just isn’t something the children are thinking about at these young ages. They can’t even process what sexual affirmative consent is.”

In fact, California’s new law is so vague that even adults have a hard time figuring out what is required, Thompson said.

The bill, for instance, states that lack of protest or resistance does not constitute consent.

“Who can understand that, even as an adult?” Thompson asks. “How is a child going to understand that? The language in this law is confusing even for adults. It makes no sense, and now we’re going to put this on children?”

Thompson is also concerned that the bill was passed into law without any hard data proving it was necessary. One study often cited by feminists is that one in every five college women, 20 percent, get raped during their college careers.

“We’re taking false stats and making laws out of them. That’s actually doing more damage than good. The 20 percent figure was not even based on a scientific study but on an online survey,” Thompson said. “There are no stats that indicate there is a problem so why do we keep going forward in these laws? And what’s going to end up happening is we’re going to create a situation where there wasn’t one.”

Thompson said she can foresee a situation where a young boy violates the “unwanted touching” credo and gets written up by his teacher as someone to be watched as a potential rapist.

“Say a 5-year-old boy touches a girl’s arm. Could that be a violation? What if a little boy gives a girl a hug because she fell down and he wants to make her feel better? Are we going to call that a sexual assault?” she asks. “That’s a scary thought. Rape is a serious crime, it absolutely is, but rape is a crime that is best adjudicated through the criminal law system and not through the schools, which don’t have the experienced personnel to know how to deal with this.”

Thompson hopes other states don’t try to emulate California’s law.

“That is the problem. I hope not. I think other states are concerned about it too because the statistics aren’t there to justify this law in the first place, and now we’re just moving this forward to include children who are much too young to understand what’s going on,” she said.

A lot of the pressure to adopt stringent new rules against rape on college campuses is coming down through the U.S. Department of Education and the Justice Department.

The Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights has stripped colleges and universities of a crucial component of self-government, Thompson said.

“Using statistics based on flimsy social science to manufacture hysteria about a ‘rape epidemic’ on campuses, the federal government is mandating the overthrow of due process in adjudicating accusations of sexual assault.”

California is the only state to have officially adopted the controversial “yes means yes” consent law for college students although other states have looked into enacting similar affirmative consent policies, reported Campus Reform.

Earlier this month, the Department of Justice released a new report on sexual assault that showed college students are less likely to become victims of sexual assault than non-students, the report stated. The Bureau of Justice Statistics report also claimed that 6.1 per 1,000 students are victims of sexual assault, debunking the widely quoted 1-in-5 statistic activists previously referenced.

Read more at http://www.wnd.com/2014/12/activists-schools-must-teach-sex-consent-to-kindergartners/#1DiLTgQvtRYL4eU1.99