Thread: UK Teachers To Ask 11 Yr Olds If They Are Gay

Fury at equality watchdog after it calls for teachers to ask 11-year-olds if they are gay

By Paul Sims
Last updated at 8:50 AM on 28th March 2011
224 Comments

Children as young as 11 could soon be asked about their sexuality without their parents’ consent, it has emerged.

Teachers, nurses and youth workers are being urged to set up pilot studies aimed at monitoring adolescent sexual orientation for the first time.

A report commissioned by the Government’s equalities watchdog found that it was ‘practically and ethically’ possible to interview young children about their sexuality.


Teachers, nurses and youth workers are being urged to set up pilot studies aimed at monitoring adolescent sexual orientation for the first time.

Controversially, it says parental consent, while ‘considered good practice’, is not a legal necessity.

The report for the much-criticised Equality and Human Rights Commission recommends that children should be asked if they are gay from the age of 11. A record should be kept of those unsure or ‘questioning’ their sexuality.

It says monitoring sexual orientation among youngsters could help to prevent them from becoming victims of discrimination, and claims that ‘some young people begin to question their sexual orientation as early as age eight and may begin to identify as LGB (lesbian, gay, bisexual) from early adolescence’.

The report has provoked outrage. Graham Stuart, Tory chairman of the Commons education select committee, said the plans were ‘invasive, sinister and threatening’.

He added: ‘School should be a place of safety, not a place where pupils are picked over for the purpose of some quango; and many children won’t understand what they are talking about.’

The report – Researching and Monitoring Adolescence and Sexual Orientation: Asking the Right Questions, at the Right Time – says it is ‘critical’ to track children’s sexuality to ‘shed light on the complexities of young people’s developing sexual orientation and how this may disadvantage them’.

It tell researchers not to dismiss gay feelings of interviewees as ‘a passing phase’.

Some youngsters, it says, may use categories such as ‘questioning’, ‘queer’, ‘pansexual’, ‘genderqueer’, ‘asexual’, ‘pan-romantic’ and even ‘trisexual’.

Last night, a commission spokesman said: ‘This is independent research produced to help the commission form its policy direction.’

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article ... s-gay.html

For goodness' sake! You can't really tell that young, sexuality is highly fluid in that stage of youth!!! Kids can sometimes have a "crush" on the same gender (especially someone they look up to as a hero), then start liking the opposite sex and they are never again interested in the same sex. It's too young to define someone's sexuality. And some kids haven't even begun to feel romantic feelings at all yet (most boys develop a few years later than girls). And, in any case, and whatever the child's sexuality is going to be, WHAT A QUESTION for a teacher to be confronting an 11 year-old child with, especially in public!! TOTALLY inappropriate subject to be discussing with elementary school age kids!!!