How to inform children and adolescents about sexuality? For thirty years, Professor Israel Nisand has been going to middle and high schools to talk to students about their relationship with sex, the danger of the values and images conveyed by pornography, sexual violence or the notion of consent. While pornography has never been so accessible, on specialized sites or social networks, and adolescents watch, sometimes very young, videos of “rare violence”, the gynecologist struggles to put concrete words on what these adolescents feel, correctly define sexual practices, reduce the sexist or homophobic stereotypes that surround them, and protect young people against the sexual violence of which they could be victims.
While the new education program for emotional, relational and sexual life (Evars) at school proposed by the government is already strongly criticized by the far right and part of conservative circles, as well as by the minister responsible for academic success Alexandre Portier, the doctor, author of Talking about sex: how to inform our teenagers (Grasset, 2024), insists on the need “to inform children and adolescents who will, otherwise, be educated by pornography and sexual violence”. Interview.
L’Express: The new Evars program provides intervention on the subjects of emotional and sexual life from kindergarten, to learn in particular to name the parts of one’s body or to accept and refuse certain situations, until high school, with more reflections pushes on sexuality. Why do you think these sessions are necessary from a young age?
Israel Nisand: Because when there is no information about sexual and emotional life, children and adolescents are the first to pay the bill. Firstly, in a country where 20% of children are victims of sexual violence, not educating them to pronounce the right terms when talking about their body, including when talking about their sex, not teaching them to say “no, you have no right to touch me here, nor to wash me like that between the buttocks”, this is a serious mistake. During adolescence, it is the young women who will then pay very dearly for the lack of information on sexual practice: they are the ones who will pass through the doors of a hospital to have an abortion or to have a rape recorded. In the absence of information about sex life, as is currently the case, young people make do with what they have at hand. That is, biased information or the pornography model. Letting them get information this way is modern barbarism.
What do you mean by “modern barbarism”?
Today we have a “scissors effect” between two unapplied laws: the law on information about emotional and sexual life, put in place since 2001 but very little applied in practice in schools, and the law on the protection of minors, in the sense that it has never been easier for a child or adolescent to connect to a pornographic site or view videos and images of this kind on social networks. There is no need to know the platforms or to be initiated by anyone: on a search engine, you will come across pornographic images after a few clicks. Children share them in the playground and can be confronted with them from the age of 9 or 10.
If I speak of “modern barbarism”, it is because these images are often of incredible violence: the porn businessmen have understood that the most transgressive images are those which work the best, and always go further to convince their audience to buy them. We are thus talking about videos which depict rape, gang rape, incest, zoophilia. Very violent sexual practices, without any notion of consent. This is how teenagers were able to ask me if women liked this type of practice, and when I told them that they did not like it, they retorted: “That’s not true sir, you have to see the noise they make when they do it. This is also how I end up with young girls in my office who tell me that they saw a porn film with “their boyfriend” during the weekend, and that he wanted to do everything that there was in the film when they didn’t want it. Or who ask me, in anguish: “Sir, should I do it?”
What is the role of parents in educating their children on the subject?
It is essential, obviously. But most teenagers won’t tell their parents what they’ve seen on pornographic sites, they protect them. Likewise, they do not talk to those around them about the sexual violence they may have suffered in childhood or which they heard about from their peers. There is an absence of dialogue about what they see and what they feel: porn can cause shock, but also real excitement, accentuated by the feeling of being forbidden – three feelings which also promote addiction.
When a teenager consumes porn three hours a day, he is not going to confide in his parents on the subject, nor, for that matter, in his SVT teacher. They do their job very well to talk about sexually transmitted infections or reproduction, but will not have the answers to much deeper questions about sexuality. We don’t discuss questions like: “What is orgasm? What is virginity?” in SVT or with all parents. Yet they are necessary, whether we like it or not.
In such a context, how can we re-establish dialogue at school on these issues?
First of all, I would like to remind you that adolescents are much more demanding than we think on these subjects. Talk to a teenager, you will see that he sincerely wants to know how to please a girl, what women like or not, just like a teenage girl will wonder how to please a boy. We are very far from simple health advice on STIs, and school has its full role on these subjects.
On the other hand, you cannot inform children and adolescents if you yourself are uncomfortable with these subjects or with your own sexuality: you risk falling off the horse at the first kick of the rodeo… There is therefore a need for training, obviously. I have been proclaiming it since 2001: if we had started training professionals at that time, and had cared about recruiting them, we would not be where we are today. But sexuality education classes have been effectively blocked by the most religious and conservative parents or a certain political fringe, as is the case today. I emphasize it once again: it is a mistake. It seems to me that it is not the parents who are crying scandal today who will best educate their children on the subject, with the right examples and the right words. Ditto for those who use gender theories – which, I remind you, are not in the Evars program – to try to block the latter.
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