Deborah Coddington: Abuse education stepping over fine line

In the wake of the sentencing of sexual predator Peter Robert Jordan to preventive detention with 12 years minimum for 15 counts of rape and 23 attempted or actual sexual assaults of young boys, there's more talk about protecting children from sexual abuse.

Jordan loves what he does. He's preyed on vulnerable kids for 30 years, setting himself up as a counsellor, running halfway houses for children sleeping rough, listening to their troubles before plying them with drugs and alcohol then sexually violating them.

You read about people like Jordan and marvel at how tolerant our society really can be.

When he's caught - again (he was in my 1996 and 2004 Paedophile & Sex Offender Indexes) - the question's asked: "How did he get away with it?"

Partly because the Peter Jordans of this world are manipulative and clever enough to target their victims.

But in light of this, you'd be reassured to know since the late 1980s, schools throughout New Zealand have run Keeping Ourselves Safe programmes, beginning with 5-year-olds.

Credit for this goes to Owen Sanders QSM, one-time national manager of the Police Youth Education Service, who was dismayed at the police's inadequacy in dealing with the prevention of child abuse.

Sanders' intentions were genuine (see his 1997 speech at tinyurl.com/dgvhmx), but you know what they say about the road to hell.

Somewhere on that road, Sanders' intentions have gone awry.

A friend contacted me this week, dismayed at material her two small children, aged 6 and 7, were bringing home from school.

My friend is not a fundamentalist Christian, or the sort who sees all men as rapists, but when 6-year-old "Molly" produced a drawing of two naked children with instructions that Mum and Dad had to "use correct names at all times for the genitals so that children can use them if talking to a doctor or nurse if they need to report abuse", my friend was angry.

"This is just the antithesis of Molly's experience," she said.

"She knows she has a bottom, she does wees and poos, but that's it. This is the sort of ideology that kicked off the Peter Ellis case; a little boy sitting in the bath talking about Peter's penis. I'm not going to wreck my daughter's childlike approach to life.

"She's into Winnie the Pooh, Hannah Montana, Barbie. At the age of 6, she doesn't need to know about vulva, vagina, anus, clitoris."

Quite. I've had seven babies and I didn't know correct names like labia majora and labia minora until my husband looked over my shoulder as I wrote this column.

Sounds like boys' names at an English public school, as in: "Labia Minor, pick up that rubbish".

He says he got his sex education from the Woman's Weekly, but I doubt it, especially as Jean Wishart was editor when he was a teen.

Back to my friend, who the next day became even more livid when her 7-year-old son, "Toby", brought home his note.

"Today we learned about different types of touch," it said. "Touch we like, touch that hurts and we want to stop, and confusing touch we want to stop, such as sexual touch."

How do you explain the concept of sexual touching to a 7-year-old?

There is no denying, with New Zealand's alarmingly high rate of child sexual abuse, the need to tell children how to protect themselves - but wouldn't it at least be polite to ask parents of such young children? My friend's main objection was that she wanted to be the one to determine when her daughter would learn the correct anatomical names for her body, not some random teacher.

And just how, exactly, does using the correct body-part name protect you from abuse?

The saddest thing about this is it presumes abuse has already happened; the children use the right names to talk to the doctor about the abuse. Saying "vagina" rather than "fanny" won't stop a pervert.

This is another example of our education system shutting out parents. We know best, the State is saying, leave it to us. Obviously, the teachers don't know best because they send the difficult bits home to mum and dad, like sexual touching explanations.

It's that same attitude from the State that failed the latest victims of Peter Jordan. The public weren't allowed to be notified of his past.

Some Waitara folk suspected Jordan was a risk and did their best to warn kids away from him. But there are more laws to protect the likes of sex offenders than there are to protect innocent children.

A leaflet drop could have breached Jordan's so-called right to privacy.

Want to protect kids? Amend the Privacy Act, ostensibly to protect us from the State, but increasingly used to prevent us from protecting ourselves from the reputedly dangerous.