Anna’s Story
To summarise my own sex-ed: don’t have sex until you’re 16. Don’t have sex unless you’re in a long-term relationship with someone you love. Don’t have sex without a condom. Don’t get pregnant. If you do any of these things, you’re stupid, it’ll ruin your life, and you deserve what’s coming to you. An attitude forever immortalised by Mean Girls.
It’s well documented that this type of sex-ed is ineffective at stopping teenagers from having sex. And I am living, breathing proof of that.
13 years ago I became pregnant. I did all the things I shouldn’t. I wasn’t 16, I wasn’t (at that point) in a loving long-term relationship, I didn’t really care about the concept of virginity as much as people told me I should and I didn’t use a condom. I couldn’t get the morning-after-pill as I was waiting at home for an Amazon delivery for my dad.
And it turns out that in some ways, all of the adults in my life were right - it was shit and it did briefly ruin my life.
As you can imagine, there were many traumatic moments during this period: seeing the blue line; morning sickness; going to the scan and finding out I was 20 weeks pregnant; the doctor forcing me to look at the scan; the doctor turning the heartbeat up to full; telling my dad in the headteacher’s office; my family’s reaction; having a bump; being in labour for hours; being grounded for months and missing all the Year 11 parties.
(One thing that they definitely got wrong was that it would ruin my education - being grounded for months meant that I absolutely smashed my GCSEs).
However, years later, I now recognise that I wasn’t stupid, and I didn’t deserve what happened. I was just a 15-year-old young person who didn’t have good sex education.
If there is one thing that history can teach us is that you cannot control a young person’s sexuality. From the Bible to Shakespeare to Dolly Parton we know one thing: if a teeneger wants to get it on, by God they will find a way to do so.
Instead there are two things we can control: 1. What we teach them, 2. How we make them feel.
Example 1: Yes, I knew about wearing a condom. If there’s one thing my scant education taught me, it was this. However, no one taught me about how to navigate the pressure to not wear one. And the issues with prioritising someone else’s pleasure over my own safety.
Example 2: When I look at the list of traumatic experiences it is not the bodily side of it that I find upsetting. Of course, it’s intense to remember that I have been in labour, and to guess that if I became pregnant again I might know it through the weird cravings I had, like Haribo Tangfastics (although perhaps this is specific to a 15 year old pregnancy…) Nor is it the morality - I do not have a belief system which assigns personhood to a foetus, so this is not something I’ve personally had to process. More acutely, it is how I was treated by many adults around me as a pregnant teenager. The doctor who turned up the heartbeat and made me look at the scan whilst I was in my school uniform was a particularly bad one. Some family members’ shame around my sexuality. It being made so visible created anxiety from adults around me about it being discussed amongst their friends.
This heady mixture of shame, disgust and embarrassment is what really traumatised me.
Who knows for certain, but I expect that if I’d had a sex and relationships education that encouraged open conversations around sexuality, and gave me the tools to safely navigate my sexual experiences perhaps I wouldn’t have become pregnant.
But at this point in my life, I’m not talking about this from a place of regret or sadness. I also don’t blame those adults whose concern mainly came from a place of fear for my safety.
Instead, I feel supremely lucky it was this experience that led me to meeting the first adults in my life who didn’t make me feel ashamed or guilty about this experience or my sexuality. I had staff members in school who were nothing but supportive and understanding. My mum found me free (!) counselling for pregnancy endings, which enabled me to process and safely explore discussions around sex from the age of 16.
It was these experiences that led me to understand what good relationships and sex education can look like, and how genuinely life-changing it can be. This was an intense privilege, without which, I don’t know how my developing brain would have handled the shitstorm or where I’d be now.
It’s just a shame I had to have a teenage pregnancy in order to access this support.
Our top priority for setting up Split Banana (SB) has never been to stop people getting pregnant (although we of course teach people how to avoid unintended pregnancies). Instead, it is to provide open, shame-free Relationship, Sex and Health Education (RSHE), and to help other adults to do the same.
This is the first time I’m publicly sharing the throughline between my own experience and setting up SB. Not because I’m ashamed of my 15-year-old self but because I didn’t want the focus to come back to sex-ed and pregnancies.
Each and every one one of us has probably at one point in our lives experienced a link between a sexual experience and the emotions of shame, disgust, silence and rejection. From navigating experiences of gender identities, sexual orientation, sexual violence, sexual pain, relationship dilemmas - the list goes on. And every one of us could probably have benefitted from having a non-judgemental conversation with a kind, supportive adult.
It is then with immense joy and pride that I sit here and read through our current impact figures. We have provided inclusive, informative and shame-free RSHE to over 11,000 young people. We have worked with over 1,000 adults to model and explain what this looks like and how to do it, including professionals who work with some of the most vulnerable people in our society.
Reading feedback like this reminds me of the importance of this work.
The other milestone this week is that I had a conversation with my Mum where I told her about my new journey into non-monogamy. Instead of shame or embarrassment there was only sweet curiosity, support and an excitement to go watch the new Netflix series of ‘How to Build a Sex Room’. It is this kind of experience that reminds me that it is possible to move away from conversations around sexuality which are based on fear and shame, and it is instead possible to hold a space filled with warmth, respect and lightness.