Prime Minister Stephen Harper meets with Kathleen Wynne, Premier of Ontario.

8 graders have addressed sex-edu,Wynee asks minister to incorporate change

Two 13-year-old girls are leading a charge to include consent in Ontario’s forthcoming sex-education curriculum.Tessa Hill and Lia Valente are both grade 8 students at a Toronto public school and they want to ensure that when they and their classmates learn about sex education. A petition they posted to the Change.org has gone from just over 400 to well over 1,500 signatures and counting since Tuesday morning.
For Hill and Valente, the changes and the inclusion of consent in those reforms is not only important to them, but to generations to come. They first started exploring the issue of consent as part of a school project on a social justice issue. They chose “rape culture,” and Hill has been quoted by a leading daily from Toronto that they learned through their research, “in order to end rape culture, we have to create a consent culture.” “The key to creating that is education,” Valente added. She said schools focus on abstinence and sexually transmitted infections, but not what consent looks and sounds like.
The crusade of Hill and Valente seems to have got the attention of Premier Kathleen Wynne,.With cases of sexual harassment and sexual violence in the spotlight, Wynne directed the Ministry of Education to include things such as healthy relationships and consent in the new learning documents, which will be used in schools across the province this fall.
Wynne has asked Education Minister Liz Sandals “to finalize a new health and physical education curriculum that gets at some of the root causes of gender inequality, and starts at the very earliest stages to develop an understanding of healthy relationships and consent.”
The new curriculum is expected to be released in the next two months.