This charity is urging parents to check their children are being taught about porn

Parents are being urged to write to their children’s school to ask them to teach subjects related to porn.

The sexual health charity FPA wants parents to find out if topics such as consent will be covered by schools as they feel it is important to help children to develop healthy relationships and stay safe online.

The appeal comes in response to findings from an FPA survey of more than 2,000 parents which revealed that 90% thought it was important to talk to children about issues related to pornography such as consent, communication, body image and self-esteem.

Despite that fact, only around half of parents of children aged 13-18 had done so.

Now as part of the FPA’s Sexual Health Week, the charity want to help parents to contact their children’s schools to get confirmation that they are teaching the subjects their children need to know in order to develop healthy relationships.

“Parents, teachers and the government have all told us that schools need to be teaching subjects related to porn, such as body image, self-esteem, consent and communication,” Natika Halil, chief executive of FPA told the Huffington Post.

“These topics of course need to be age-appropriate, and should never involve showing porn in schools,” she continued.

“It’s about ensuring that young people’s education provides an opportunity to frankly discuss a range of issues, so that they have the skills they need to contextualise pornography as a fantasy and to challenge some of the stereotypes it may contain.”

The FPA believes that knowing they have the support of parents in teaching about these topics can help teachers feel confident in creating and delivering lessons that both empower and inform young people.

The hope is that this will in turn help encourage youngsters to be in control of their own sexual health and wellbeing, which will then mean they go on to have happy and fulfilling relationships.

The move comes as it was revealed earlier this year that children at nursery school could soon be taught about same-sex relationships and transgender lifestyles.

Back in April, the National Union of Teachers (NUT) voted for “age-appropriate” content surrounding LGBT issues to be taught to children aged two to four in the hope it will help challenge homophobia and reduce hate crime.

And in March, it was revealed that primary schools are likely to be legally obliged to teach about same-sex couples as part of new compulsory sex and relationship education.

General secretary Kevin Courtney said it was important children are given “well-balanced, age-appropriate information” on relationships and LGBT issues.

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