Our sexual paradox

We pretend to be a socially conservative nation. We don't talk straight about sex. We shy away from sex education at schools. Many of us go to church on Sundays. We believe in God who, like Socrates and Immanuel Kant, encourages us to treat our neighbours as we would like to be treated.

The reality, of course, is very different. Our rape statistics are the worst in the world. The way we treat women and children shows we don't care much about them.

Young girls are becoming pregnant when they should be reading Harry Potter and playing Minecraft or hockey and netball.

According to a recent newspaper report, 1565 young girls have fallen pregnant in Mpumalanga in the first quarter of this school year. According to the same report, there were "only" 1602 pregnant schoolgirls in the whole of last year. What happened to change the sexual behaviour of schoolchildren in a few months is anybody's guess.

It certainly wasn't sex education. No, no, no. We don't talk about sex in public. We certainly don't talk to our children about sex. We're shy, embarrassed - we're quite colonial, quite British in our ways. Except that, in private, we bully, beat and rape. Though we don't talk about any of this either.

The paradox became apparent after the furore at Metro FM last week.

After sex educator Jade Zwane spoke about masturbation and the importance of talking to children about sex during an interview with T-BO Touch (what a name for this subject), he and his team were suspended pending a management investigation into alleged misconduct.

Zwane is rightly incensed. Unusually, her parents did talk about sex with her from an early age and this encouraged her to wait, she told this newspaper.

"I didn't feel I needed to rush because I had read books about it. And my mom took me to a gynie before my first sexual experience, which was at 23 years," she said.

There she goes again: talking about sex.

The radio station managers were wrong to cut the interview short.

Children and their parents need to be informed.

The more knowledge children have, the better equipped they will be to protect themselves from sexual predators both real and digital, to prevent teenage pregnancy, and to learn the distinction between sex and porn. The sooner they know the facts, the better for our children.