Children should be taught sex-ed and consent, and I mean children as young as primary school-aged children. A lot of people are against teaching little kids about sex but I feel like doing so actually does more good than harm. By giving children knowledge on the subject it can help to allow children going through SA to understand what is happening to them and report it. It can also help to prevent children from being SAed by making them less desirable targets for sexual predators and by making it so that they more likely to establish their boundaries and report to someone when they feel like their boundaries have been violated. By constantly sheltering children, we are only making them more vulnerable to being SAed and experiencing prolonged sexual abuse. Along with that, a lot of younger kids end up learning about sex through the internet, which is incredibly dangerous and harmful. It's better to allow children to learn about sex in a safe environment rather than to hide it from them and have them found out about it through more dangerous and harmful means.
Beyond this, learning about their sexuality can make things like puberty less scary and shameful for them. I remember feeling ashamed for a long time during childhood because I didn't realize that masturbation was normal (I started doing it before puberty, lol). I didn't even realize that what I was doing was even masturbation. I viewed it as this bad habit I had all my life and thought of it as something I needed to stop. I felt gross. Children shouldn't ever feel gross or ashamed for going through normal things.
We have this tendency to overly shelter them, not realizing that we are doing more than good by doing so. It's not about keeping children pure and innocent, it's about teaching them things in a manner that is appropriate depending on their stage of development. We have seen over and over again how sheltering them things, from sex to death, negatively impacts them yet we still do it. Knowledge is empowering, especially for vulnerable demographics like children. It's what can help them better learn to navigate the world around them and better understand themselves.
