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Just how brave/crazy do you have to be to voluntarily broach this topic with youth?

Carrie Evans, an Austinite for 11 years, is currently a writer for the state legislature, and plans to help shape public policy. As a supporter and volunteer, Ashera Shares asked her to write a guest column about her own experience in this important field.

Carrie Evans, January 2007

For more than three years, I was the youth assistant at the First Unitarian Universalist Church of Austin. I was new to the church when I got the job and not yet familiar with OWL, or Our Whole Lives, the UU comprehensive sex education curriculum. But when I discovered I had the option of making sex ed a part of the youth program, there was no stopping me. I just so happened to have been one of those sex-clueless teenagers whose parents avoided the topic and whose friends taunted her with their supposed wealth of knowledge. Here was my opportunity to help youth de-mystify this most urgent of subjects while in turn finally satisfying my own need for the "birds and bees" talk, albeit as the grown-up.

After a weekend-long training on the high school curriculum (OWL covers kindergarten through adult), I began the work of trying to organize a class. Eventually some fellow teachers and I pulled together nine or 10 students, disproportionately male and lower classmen, and began a 12-week ride of sensitive, frank, and sometimes unnerving discussions about anatomy, sex, sexuality, relationships, sexual health, contraception and more. It was so much damn fun!

Since then, I've taught OWL to 7th and 8th graders and another round of high schoolers. Each time, the earnestness and genuine curiosity of the students remind me of the great need for them to access the information. Regardless of their intellectual pursuits, their middle-class backgrounds, their preferred forms of self expression, their levels of sexual experience, or their degrees of pretense, each one of them eventually gives way to an unabashed desire to better understand all things carnal. Because the fact of the matter is that no matter how liberal their parents are (a common trait among UU youth), they still don't want to discuss sex with them - ewww! (Surprisingly, a sentiment expressed just as often by their parents in our parent orientations.) Their friends, while perhaps claiming to know what's up, remain a somewhat dubious source. And, of course, Texas public schools have long shirked any kind of comprehensive education on the subject.

No longer the church youth assistant, I never pass up the chance to volunteer with OWL. I've been called "brave," "crazy," and "strong" for venturing into this perilous combination of sex ed and teenagers, but in fact, it's when teenagers don't have access to this information that they can be risky business. When they are allowed to consider the realm of sexuality in a safe environment, free to ask questions, admit confusion, offer opinions, volunteer knowledge, or say nothing, they reveal themselves to be pretty harmless and wonderful creatures.

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