The World Health Organisation (WHO) has stirred controversy with its guidance on sexual education for children under four, prompting calls for its withdrawal.
The guidance, aimed at European policymakers, encourages young children to “ask questions about sexuality” and “explore gender identities,” according to a report from The Telegraph.
🇺🇳 The World Health Organisation is under pressure to withdraw guidance for schools recommending that toddlers “ask questions about sexuality” and “explore gender identities” https://t.co/W5DSPAhjQt
— The Telegraph (@Telegraph) May 13, 2023
The guidance further emphasizes teaching children about the “enjoyment and pleasure when touching one’s own body, early childhood masturbation,” regarded as the “minimal standards that need to be covered by sexuality education.”
This advice, however, has been staunchly rejected by the U.K. Government, which has neither distributed nor promoted the guidelines to schools, the Telegraph notes.
A government spokesperson stated, “We offer our own guidance to help schools to teach children and young people about relationships and health.”
Laura Anne Jones MS, the shadow minister for education in Wales, vehemently opposed the WHO’s guidance, describing it as “frankly disturbing.”
“We must stop this pushing of harmful gender ideology into sex education in Wales and the UK, with immediate effect,” she asserted. “The WHO needs to rescind the advice immediately.”
Tanya Carter, from the Safe Schools Alliance, has called for an “urgent inquiry” into the influence of UN organizations like the WHO and UNESCO on the country’s RSE curriculum.
“An urgent inquiry is needed into how this ideology… has come to influence so much public thinking,” Carter stated.
A spokesman for the WHO defended the guidance, stating it is based on “established psychological facts about children’s understanding of their bodies and psychosocial development based on decades of research.”
They further claimed that the document suggests children embark on sexual education from birth, associating their understanding of “clean” and “dirty” with engagement in sex education.
The WHO document proposes three models of sexual education, “Types” one to three.
It promotes the most liberal approach, “Type 3” or “holistic sexuality education,” as a source of “unbiased” and “scientifically correct” information on “all aspects of sexuality.”
The most conservative model, an “abstinence-only” approach, is depicted as having “no positive effects on sexual behavior” or the “risk of teenage pregnancy.”
However, critics like Safe Schools Alliance U.K. believe this approach unnecessarily links children’s existence and relationships to their sexuality and sexual behaviors.
John Hayes, MP, criticized the WHO, stating, “Childhood is a time of innocence; for imagining, fairy tales, and play and joy. A lot of these people have a very warped understanding of the character of childhood and it’s actually much simpler than they claim in their guidance.”
According to Euronews, The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is responsible for more than 88% of the total amount donated by philanthropic foundations to the WHO.
Other contributors include the Bloomberg Family Foundation (3.5%), the Wellcome Trust (1.1%), and the Rockefeller Foundation (0.8%), according to the outlet.