Sexual peril is real, just as terrorism is real. But the kind of «protection» that is mobilized by fear, the kind that purports to keep the young safe by locking them in their rooms, ignorant and scared to death—policies like abstinence-only education—will not protect them. Like the U.S.A. PATRIOT Act, such policies offer only illusory security, because they do nothing to stop the wellsprings of danger. Ironically or intentionally, those wellsprings are the very ignorance and terror we're instilling in kids, whereas the means of their self-defense are knowledge and courage, as well as rights and respect, political and sexual citizenship.
Such «security» imperils something else we cannot afford to destroy: freedom. For in sex or in democracy, freedom is not a luxury; it is constitutive. We need to balance respect for young people's sexual freedom with adults' obligation to protect them. In dangerous times, we must discern which dangers threaten us for real, in the form of a virus, a rapist, or a flaming jetliner, and which are of our own making.
1 As I write, the Kansas State Senate has voted to cut $3 million from the state university budget unless the school ceases to purchase «obscene» materials used in a popular sexuality education class, such as slides of naked five- and ten-year-old girls.
