SIU’s student body deals with lackluster Sex Ed

A new sexual health survey by the Daily Egyptian shows many SIU students had little to no sexual education about safe sex, STIs or personal boundaries. Out of 141 student respondents, 16% said that they never had any form of sex education during high school or junior high school and a whopping 73.8% said that sex education didn’t thoroughly teach them about safe sex, if at all.

Partially responsible is the fact that SIU students come from a wide range of areas, each with their own cultures and predispositions towards sexual education. From small and predominantly religious towns in Southern Illinois to entirely different countries, students come from vastly different environments, which present them with attitudes and facts that might seem entirely alien in the college environment.

Ayden Rademaker, a first year student from a small town in a conservative area of Southern Illinois, said, “With my town, the attitude was more towards wanting parents to teach their own children and I was lucky that my parents did teach me – I thought – pretty properly about sex ed. But what we got in school, I didn’t think it was very effective. They used abstinence only based sex ed.”

Rademaker’s school was taught by an interest group that only briefly mentioned condoms and never taught students about other methods of birth control, preferring an abstinence-only approach, something that is hardly uncommon among SIU students. Out of 131 responses, 47% of students at SIU said they were never taught how to use condoms to any extent in their own sex education.

The group that educated Rademaker taught him and other young students to believe that people should only have sex when they want children. Students walked away from the lectures with no understanding of the human impulse to have sex, or distinctions like the difference between love and infatuation. Instead, emphasis was placed on the importance of communicating boundaries with other people, with little thought for what might happen if students later decided to have sexual relationships of their own volition.

Much of Rademaker’s practical knowledge came from his parents, but many of his peers weren’t so lucky. Even in a college environment, where more students are statistically more likely to come from parents with a background in higher education according to the Center for Education Statistics’ study and a 2016 pew research study showing that college graduates are more likely to be liberal, the DE’s survey found that 81.6% of students said they received an incomplete education on boundaries and relationships before coming to college.

“A lot of people had parents like mine who taught them a lot of good things like how to practice safe sex, and, you know, all that stuff,” Rademaker said. “Or they had nothing. And there are a lot of teen pregnancies, for example, in my town. So yeah, I saw a lot of that happening.”

True to college stereotypes, many of Rademaker’s friends are sexually active even as a group that’s more religious than average. However, he considers them to mostly be mature adults who highly prioritize safe sex, with several even taking a abstinence only approach as is often encouraged in religious circles. Despite the fact that much of his incomplete sexual education was offered from a religious standpoint, Rademaker finds his friends knowledgeable, even if their better instincts mainly came down to luck and good parenting.

“[But] Some of us don’t really practice safe sex, like I know someone who got pregnant as a very young teenager, and she just gave birth to her child not very long ago, and she’s pregnant again. So I see like, recurring theme, people not really learning,” he said.

According to the Guttmacher Institute, a research organization dedicated to sexual health, only 17 states require that sex education in public school is medically accurate, with Illinois among them. Still, 12 states don’t require sexual education at all, including Illinois, and only four states prohibit sex education from promoting religion.

“I think the [Daily Egyptian’s] results really speak to the culture and the approach to sex education in the U.S.,” said Nichole Greenwood, a graduate psychology student from the United Kingdom. “I think they can be shocking to many people. But for me, they’re just not that shocking. Considering that people that I’ve spoken to directly in the U.S. have said that they either did not get sex education, or their parents signed them out of sex ed, because they didn’t want them to learn about it in school. So I think that it goes to show that people who don’t get the sex education don’t know how to practice safe sex.”

Many students, such as Ronnie Greiner, a trans man, try to compensate for inadequate  school education with the internet, or through chatting with their friends. Greiner was dissatisfied with the sexual education school provided because it separated students by gender regardless of the fact that the information was relevant to both male and female students.

“I actually got most of my education from the internet. Like, I learned some things when I was really young. Like, I think at the very least my parents were teaching us about boundaries and, like, what should and shouldn’t be happening when we were kids, like, as far back as I can remember. Then I started formally learning in school, like, fifth grade, like everyone else,” said Greiner. “I didn’t find it at SIU because I kind of already built up that support network when I was younger. Because I came in as a transfer student, I think I was 24. So a lot of my information, a lot of the people who kind of mentored me, I had known for several years. So by the time I got here, I felt like I ended up mentoring a lot more people, especially when I joined the Saluki Rainbow Network. So I was, like, ‘yeah, I know a lot of things.’ And people ended up asking me more questions and stuff.”

Greiner’s time in secondary school was made even more complicated by the fact that very few people were aware of what a trans person was in the first place, let alone how to educate one on safe sex. Though Greiner was well taught about STIs, to this day only 10 states require that sexual education is inclusive of minority sexual orientations, leaving much of their education to chance or peers rather than risking an awkward conversation. Only 10.8% of students surveyed by the Daily Egyptian found their sex education to be inclusive of all gender identities and sexual orientations.

“I think that it can get dangerous in some ways,” Greenwood said. “You know, if someone doesn’t know how to practice, and they maybe look to pornography or something, it’s not really, you know, realistic, or accurate to what sex is like, from real life. So you can get views and ideas about sex, that maybe aren’t realistic to everyday life. So you risk that. There are obviously good resources online, but whether people actually get those resources is debatable.”

Greenwood, one of only 46% of students who told the DE they consistently practice safe sex, benefited from the direct attention of medical professionals, who taught sex education directly at her school and independently of any religious rhetoric or scare tactics.

“Having a trusted person can, for example, like a medical professional or you know, even a parent or something that is informed, can give you the right information, the resources to use, and they come from an unbiased position, which I think is important. Because there’s many, not just sex ed, but there’s many different examples of people coming from like a biased point of view when they’re teaching someone something.”

To Greenwood, the idea of sex as something embarrassing and awkward to talk about is alien. Learning about sex in a school setting isn’t something parents would withdraw their kids from in Greenwood’s experience of the UK, and STI screenings are very common occurrences, which her friends treat as casual necessities. This is in sharp contrast to the survey respondents at large, of which 48.2% have never tested for STIs.

The magnitude of the problem makes it difficult to lay at the feet of any one institution, especially because so much sex education depends upon students’ own interest in learning about such a personal subject. At least some portion of students are likely to dismiss sexual education as something they have already learned through their own means, surrendering the comfort, and authority of the education that Greenwood received. Though the student response to written questions on the DE’s survey wasn’t as robust as on the multiple choice questions, a significant portion of the students asked to specify where they received their sex education specified the internet, their parents, and their peers.

The relative enlightenment of a college campus offers an easy solution to the problem, which was anticipated long before this survey. SIU’s health center offers sexual education to students, RSOs and Greek life organizations on request and for free.

“We think it’s really important for students to be as informed as possible to have as much knowledge as they can to make healthy decisions for themselves,” said Shelly Ridgeway, assistant director for all of Student Health Services. “And then we try to do that without judgment without making them feel shame. You know, it’s really more about getting all of the information, the services, the resources to help you be as well as you can, and ultimately be a successful student. That’s what we care about.”

Despite the Health Centers relatively affordable services, which typically cost between 10 to 15 dollars, and an abundance of free condoms (including flavored condoms) many students are completely unaware of the services offered there. The health center offers students nearly all other varieties of sexual protections at limited prices, or even no price at all, including a pharmacy that offers birth control prescriptions. Additionally, the health center has confidential counselors for sexual violence and LGBTQIA+ issues, as well as therapists trained to deal with relationship conflicts, and is currently trying to establish free STI testing services. It also hosts workshops on assertiveness and all matters of sexual health, and offers community forums over the sexual health vulnerabilities of different groups on campus.

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