Peer Pressure On Positive Track
If the idea of teens learning about sex from each other worries you, there are a couple dozen young folks you should meet.
Twenty-two of them, actually, and they’ve spent the past eight months learning how to protect themselves and their peers from sexual assault, a topic that many parents are reluctant to discuss.
Even when responsible parents and their youngsters do have frank conversations about sex, having appropriate messages reinforced by peers will strengthen teens’ ability to handle the pressures of adolescence wisely.
That’s where the diverse teenagers in Youth for a SAFE Spokane come in. Under a grant from the state Office of Crime Victims Advocacy, they have been learning not only about sexual assault but also about community organization.
They are preparing to move into the community, sharing their message of alertness, self-respect and sound decision making with other teens, with community groups and even with policy makers.
They want young men and women to know that no one ever has the right to force anyone to have sex, and that serious consequences await anyone who tries. Such statements may seem too obvious to warrant the breath it takes to utter them but specialists who work with victims of sexual assault know how much confusion surrounds an issue that is so hard to discuss.
In a world that doesn’t welcome their inquiries, some young people find themselves isolated from help. They get into jams. They make bad decisions. And when those decisions have disastrous results, the young vicims frequently don’t even realize they’ve been victimized.
Youth for a Safe Spokane (SAFE is an acronym for Sexual Assault Free Environment) is a pilot project intended to tap young people’s own input in developing a way to deliver a vital message to their contemporaries.
Surveys taken last fall when the project was beginning revealed some attitudes that should cause us all to pause. For one thing, teens tend to think the rest of the community does not consider sexual assault to be as serious an issue as they do. They even perceive moderate tolerance of sexual violence.
Whether the perceptions are accurate is not as important as the fact they exist. Clearly, the community needs to speak with a louder, clearer and more unequivocal voice that sexual assault is never tolerated. And we should all applaud the teens who met faithfully, worked diligently and recruited their friends for the important educational task they have undertaken.