Henry Wisewood Highschool Sexual Assault
Hello!
I wanted to start a discussion about the recent sexual assault that occurred at Henry Wisewood Highschool.
For those that don’t know, a school coach was arrested for grooming and sexually assaulting a teenage girl at the school over the course of 2 years. He also sent an explicit video of himself to a group of boys by accident.
This is extremely disturbing, and it’s massively disappointing that this happened to this girl while she was at school.
When you look the perpetrator up, you see he has posted many photos of girls from Henry Wisewood on his facebook. That already is a very inappropriate thing to be doing, and it’s concerning that this person wasn’t flagged as being dangerous earlier.
I’m a 27 year old women, and I was also groomed and assaulted as a teenager. This subject is very important to me because I know what this process looks like and how intensely painful it is.
We should use this event to open conversations about sexual abuse and sexual education in Alberta. We need to remember that when kids turn 12 and they go to middle school, their community and culture drastically changes. There’s more talk about sex, more kids, more hostility, and less facilitated community.
If we don’t give kids answers about sex they fill those gaps in on their own, often leading to poor understandings of sexuality.
We need to have the ability to have these conversations with young people to keep them safe. I think that includes talk about sexual harassment, age gap/power dynamics in sexuality, pornography and pornography addiction, shame in sexuality, and identifying sexual abuse.
In my generation, sex education involved basic biology and the STI talk. It didn’t really relate to day to day experiences.
Some other things to consider…
-Would it be more effective to give parents sexual education, considering sexual education up until this point has been limited?
-Social work students need practical hours to complete their degree. Can we involve social workers in supporting proper development in public school?