The results of the survey of young people aged 16–17 in England carried out by Censuswide at the end of 2021 should not have surprised anyone. Despite the government making it mandatory for relationships and sex education (RSE) in secondary schools and relationships education in primary schools, the pupils didn't seem impressed.
Only a third rated the RSE as good, while 22% rated it as bad. The accounts of opportunities for pupils to feedback on their feelings were even worse. A mere 20% said they had the “opportunity to ask my questions and get answers”, and just 14% could remember “being asked my opinion about how RSE could be improved”.
Theatre has sometimes tried to address this issue, and in 2022, with Arts Council funding, Josie Dale-Jones and a group of performers created The Family Sex Show for children aged five to sixteen accompanied by an adult. Josie explained in The Guardian that, “the show is a fun and playful performance made up of songs, dances and personal stories. It is about bodies and how society views them. It also explores themes including gender, sexuality, pleasure and boundaries. But really, the show is about care and mutual respect”.
Perhaps not surprisingly in a society that isn’t very good on children’s rights, before it was even made, it was hammered by a moral panic that resulted in the Arts Council withdrawing funding and venues cancelling performances. A Little Inquest Into What We Are All Doing Here lets us glimpse some of the consequences of that panic.
The show opens with an orange body-bag wriggling across the stage. The body inside is Josie, very much alive but traumatised from what happened, including threats to her life.
Extricating herself from the bag, she sits at the inquest table behind a clutch of microphones. She describes her own sex education as consisting of tampons being dipped in Ribena and later being shown how to put a condom on a courgette. Not the ideal training for life.
With the aid of voiceovers, a recording of an early morning phone call and quotes from messages she received, we see the scale of the persecution she and her family suffered. This included death threats delivered to her parents’ home. As a result, the show was never performed. The safety curtain is lowered and placed over the table.
Josie then, dressed in a bright silver suit, dances across the stage to the song "That’s Entertainment", which is the “harmless” way some people would like theatre to be.
The events continue to impact on Josie, and we see something of this in the final section of the show when she is in a slightly heated engagement with her boyfriend, played by Laurence Baker. He tells her, “you should stick to weird theatre. I want my girlfriend back.” Instead, it's back to the body bag for Josie.
The show is well-performed, necessary and entertaining. It doesn’t bring back the opportunity for young people to see The Family Sex Show, but maybe the government which claims to be so concerned about relationships and sex education in schools should apologise for the treatment Josie endured and fund it to be performed to support families and children to respectfully learn about this difficult area.