Cape Town - Faith-based organisations have expressed outrage at the teaching of comprehensive sexuality education (CSE) at Western Cape schools.
The Western Cape Education Department’s metro north district has launched a teenage pregnancy awareness programme to prevent at-risk youth falling pregnant.
The department on Sunday confirmed that its CSE initiative was being implemented under life orientation as part of Curriculum Assessment Policy Statement (CAPS).
The Department of Basic Education (DBE) has made it clear that CSE was neither sexual education, nor taught learners how to have sex.
CSE also did not sexualise children, focused on the physical relationships between humans, or taught behaviour and values that encouraged this, the DBE stressed.
Christian View Network (CVN) director Philip Rosenthal said it was opposed to the CSE at schools, citing as “inappropriate” the material being used for scripted lesson plans.
“We are completely opposed to scripted lesson plans, which is just adding petrol to fire because it is going to make children curious and want to experiment. The parents and teachers were interpreting sexual education in a pro-marriage, pro-moral manner, so they’ve inserted the word comprehensive, which means they want to teach the children everything from a young age when they’re not supposed to be having sex at all,” Rosenthal said.
The scripted lesson plans start with learners in Grade 4 and goes up to 12. CVN has been advocating for these scripted lessons only to be taught with parental consent.
Head of the Cape Town Ulama board, Mufti Sayed Haroon Al Azhari, said: “We agree that teenage pregnancy out of wedlock is a moral dilemma in society.
“Although proper education regarding sexual intimacy from a religious perspective is very important, our concern is that the secular sex education model runs the risk of not addressing this specific dilemma.”
Muslim Judicial Council deputy president Shaykh Riaad Fataar said the concern was a moral degradation perpetuated in society.
“When it comes to teenage pregnancy, Islam does not say let us go and take preventative measures but rather advises to stay away to build up the morality that has gone down the drain.
“There is a moral degradation that is happening and Islam puts certain practices and principles in place that is important for us to uphold,” Fataar said.
The latest figures recorded between March 2020 and April last year put the rate of pregnancy among girls under the age of 19 at 11.4% in the province.
In 2020, the country had 33 899 births to girls aged 17 and younger, with about 600 of these girls aged 10 to 13.
Molo Songololo director Patric Solomons said: “Parents often neglect their duty to inform and educate children adequately about child sexual reproductive health (CSRH) and rights and prefer to see their children as asexual.
“Teachers must receive adequate support and training to teach and address CSRH rights, responsibilities and protection effectively and avoid religious, cultural and social attitudes stigmatisation, and moralisation that prevent them from promoting such.”
WCED social worker Nosisa Mayosi and organiser of the awareness programme said the scripted lessons were helpful, but sometimes failed due to parents who did not co-operate.
“We are trying to prevent young people getting pregnant by equipping them with information,” Mayosi said.
De Grendel High School educational counsellor Rochelle Saulse said: “If we are going to think I am encouraging learners to be sexually involved, if you still have that mindset then I think you really need to go and sit down and go look at statistics; start looking at what is happening in society.
“We need to advocate, we need to do the sexuality education in schools to bring an end to this, because it’s generational poverty that we are creating and it's a vicious cycle.” Saulse said.