Forward Initial Consent with airSlate SignNow

Forward initial consent

the American Progress Center finds that of the 24 states that mandate sex education only a handful address consent and healthy relationships 10 states and the District of Columbia mentioned the terms sexual assault consent or healthy relationships in their sex education programs that means the majority of public school students in the u.s. are not taught how to identify healthy and unhealthy relationship behaviors Monica Rivera is the director of the women and gender activist II Center at Colorado State University my colleague Reena Ninan spoke to her about when parents should start having conversations about consent with their kids first off I want to ask you how early is too early when it comes to teaching children about consent yeah you know I think that that's actually the entire point of how we need to be shifting what we're talking about consent I don't think it's ever too early I think that we often make the mistake of not treating the topic of consent the way we treat other elements of what we talk about or what we teach kids so for example you know we don't wait until kids are you know seniors in high school to teach all elements of math because now they're old enough to understand calculus we teach age-appropriate levels of math all throughout 3 K through 12 and so I think that we really need to be shifting the way that we're talking about consent in similar ways so that we're teaching age-appropriate concept of consent from kindergarten all the way through 12th grade obviously that does mean that we need to disentangle the topic of consent though from the topic of sex obviously we're not going to be teaching kindergarteners about sex but there are ways that we can be teaching them about the concepts of body sovereignty and about respecting each other's bodies and understanding you know what it means to have body autonomy from as early of an age as possible in my own family we started when my kiddos were you know even under the age of 1 mmm Wow so how do you do that how do you separate sex from that conversation around consent yeah I mean I think that um in reality we already do that in a lot of ways so we have a culture of consent in most of our daily interactions so I would never just walk over and drink out of somebody's water bottle or you know grab a pen out of one's hand we say hey is this seat taken can I borrow your sweatshirt and so we have a pretty rich and nuanced way of talking about consent before we do things to or with other people's possessions so you know if I asked to borrow your car you know to go to Target it's safe to assume that doesn't mean wherever I want whatever target I want in the entire country right so we have a way of...