CENTRAL KITSAP — Three 14-year-old students have been suspended from Klahowya Secondary School following a sexual incident in the back seat of a school bus, according to a Kitsap County Sheriff’s Office report. Suspended were a boy and girl who engaged in oral sex in the back seat of the bus and a girl who videotaped it on her cell phone, according to the report. At least three other teens witnessed the act.
Every now and again I run across something that brings me up short and confirms for me just how much the world has changed since I was in school. It’s not that things like this didn’t happened; kids have smoked, consumed alcohol, and experimented with sex since kids were invented. No, it’s just that now technology makes it so much easier for behavior to be documented and spread from coast to coast.
It also points out just how thoroughly sexualized our society has become. Sex has always been used to sell things, of course, but with the advent of the Internet and our 500+-channel cable and satellite TV universe, sex is EVERYWHERE. No matter how much parents might try to create an environment that keeps things in perspective for their children, no parent can protect their children 24/7/365. When children have such easy access to sex and sexuality, can we really be surprised when they finally, almost inevitably act on the information they’re bombarded with?
No reasonable person would condone this sort of juvenile sexual acting out, but it shouldn’t be a stretch to understand why and how it might happen. The question, of course, is how we teach our children to deal effectively with issues related to sexuality…especially when so many adults seem to be struggling with the same issues. If we as adults can get a grip on our sexuality, how can we reasonably expect our children to do the same? Sex is an amazing, powerful, and (on a biological level, at least) very basic experience. Issues of morality aside, our children are bombarded with sex on almost constant basis in a way that my generation never was. I’ll leave the debate of whether this is a good thing to those more intellectually nimble, but I think the results speak for themselves. We’ve created a monster; the question now would seem to revolve around how we go about protecting our children….
