Children’s attraction and attachment to their smartphones is once again a topic of parental panic across the airwaves this week. With the announcement by Education Minister Richard Bruton that, after 20 years, relationship and sexuality education in Irish schools is to have a much-needed overhaul and will now include discussions at primary level about the meaning of consent, there is moralising, outrage and upset from all sides.
There is the terror of stranger danger, the fear of other people’s children, but mostly it’s the unsettling anonymity of modern life, with impassioned conversations centring on parental naivety about what children have access to or what they are being subjected to in their secret online lives. The schism between child and parent that apps and new technology are creating and the presence of easily accessible pornography loom large in all conversations.
On The Pat Kenny Show (Newstalk, weekdays) there's a lot of talk about preserving innocence, with the host concerned that addressing these issues at an early age will force children into more adult scenarios. Parents air their concerns via text about how the new curriculum could affect their Minecraft-obsessed, dinosaur-loving kids. One mother comments that her 10-year-old wouldn't have the mental capacity to cope with the complicated notion of relationships, that she is 'still reading books about fairies' – as if the complete works of Anais Nin were about to be added to the national school reading list.
This moral terror causes Kenny to wonder aloud if the idea of consent being introduced to primary sex education is not a bit “right-on” and whether it is “bandwagon jumping” after the recent Belfast rape trial, which is a slightly sensationalist reach about such a complex, emotional issue.
Luckily, his guests, INTO executive and teacher Joe McKeown and Ian Power, the executive director of Ireland's youth information website, spunout.ie, have a more level-headed, less hysterical approach, assuring Kenny that the material would have to be age-appropriate. McKeown quips that "it's the adults that have a lot of learning to do". He informs a listener who laments that the syllabus will be "too much too soon" that it's better to provide children with the right information than it being a case of "too little, too late" when having these conversations.
Power makes the point that the old attitude of sexual shame and its association with sin within this country has caused untold issues in Irish society (repercussions which are still being felt today) and that the view that sex should be something to be enjoyed must be a part of formal education in secondary schools alongside acknowledgement of LGBTQ relationships.
A texter offers the opinion that “consent features in everything from a kid’s personal space boundaries to having to give your granny a kiss”, in trying to articulate how classes for under-12s will concentrate on the idea of bodily autonomy rather than sexuality. But Kenny cannot erase from his mind the idea of a child not wanting to give their grandmother a kiss. Eventually he can only surmise that they may not want to do it on account of her perhaps possessing an unfortunate “moustache”.
A disturbing story
Over on Liveline (RTÉ Radio One, weekdays) things are more sobering with caller Brian telling Philip Boucher-Hayes a disturbing story about his son who he removed from boarding school following an incident where boys as young as twelve were coercing girls into Snapchatting explicit images for their titillation. If the girls refused to comply or to send further photos the boys blackmailed them, threatening to forward the content to their parents, friends and family.
When another caller later tries to suggest that this is just ordinary “peer pressure”, and that no one can force teens to look at these images, Boucher-Hayes becomes incensed, calling the boys’ behaviour “the most carnal, atavistic, horrendous side of human nature”.
Boucher-Hayes deftly shuts down another listener who thinks that responsibility should not solely lie with the men of the future by saying that there has been "enough victim shaming". He encourages listeners who are ignorant of the sexual pressure that their teens and young children are facing or are unaware of the imagery they are accessing, to seek out the recent much-praised consent episode of the Second Captains podcast with Richie Sadlier and Sinead O'Carroll, stating that even as a "man of the world" he was shocked to hear how young boys' minds are being shaped by pornography they are not emotionally equipped to comprehend, with its toxic lexicon about women.
Won’t someone think of the teachers, implores Marie, who wonders what parents are doing to educate their children on such matters at home, and when they will take some responsibility. But with most either living in denial about what their offspring are viewing or redundantly calling for bans on smartphone access, the current reality has yet to puncture their illusion of perfect childhood.
There is a conspiratorial warmth to O'Connell's style
But how can parents in this country have any kind of conversation with their children about sex when they can't even consider that their adult progeny are engaging in sexual relationships? On Tuesday, Muireann O'Connell (Today FM, weekdays) invites her listeners to text in with their horror stories about the first time they shared a room with their partners in the family home. There is a conspiratorial warmth to O'Connell's style that makes the puerility of the topic seem like a gossipy conversation between friends as she ruminates about the people who "grew up in a house where everyone could stay in different bedrooms and it didn't matter".
There are tales of Irish mammies crying at the very idea of their son lying beside someone in their creaky bed. There’s the story of the 40-year-old woman whose parents put her and her partner at opposite ends of the house lest they be tempted, and the embarrassed girl who made her boyfriend drive her home after his mother threw her out of her son’s room. In Ireland, the problem might not just be the kids growing up too fast but also the parents who refuse to acknowledge that fact.
Moment of the Week
The Newstalk studio seems like a place where there's guaranteed to be a lot of hot air blowing around but on Wednesday Sean Moncrieff (Newstalk, weekdays) was preoccupied with gas of a different kind, namely the noxious fumes emitted by the animal kingdom.
Interviewing zoologist and environmental scientist Dani Rabaiotti about her new book Does it Fart? listeners were treated to myriad fascinating facts about the digestion habits of various creatures. From herrings using the passing of gas to communicate and locate each other at night to the fact that the behaviour of spiders remains completely unknowable and mysterious (like the Queen) due to their flatulence having so far gone undetected. Expect this to be a new challenge on I'm A Celebrity by next year.
Moncrieff delights in hearing about how snakes use their potent wind to ward off potential predators, writhing around in their own musk like a Guinness drinker lying in bed of a Sunday morning. Although what he really wants to find out about is the age-old question “Do animals glean any joy from farting, the way humans do?” to which Rabaiotti replies that it tends to scare them more than anything – the real rumble in the jungle might be a knockout of a different kind.
