My First Month in Prevention Education
On the car ride through tumbling green mountains metamorphosing to late-September yellow, my supervisor Anne glanced over at me in the passenger seat and smiled.
“Are you nervous?” she asked me.
“A bit,” I admitted. “I’m most nervous about the little ones.”
We were on our way to a local elementary school much, much smaller than the one I attended in the suburbs of Chicago. My school had around a hundred kids per grade, while this school had ten kids per grade, give or take.
Anne assured me that my anxiety would calm the second I walked into the classroom and saw all of the tiny, eye-glimmering faces looking up at me. And she was right.
I was greeted by bouncy waddling six and seven year olds who were tripping over one another to get a good seat on the carpet in front of Anne and I. One little boy with long blonde hair came running up to us, arms reached out, and then quickly stopped himself.
“Can I give you a hug?” he asked.
“Yes! Thank you for asking,” Anne replied.
One by one, the other kiddos followed suit asking us for permission before giving us a hug. While this gesture may seem small, it indicated that the kids remembered one of their lessons from the previous year: Always ask for permission before touching someone. I was entirely captivated by the group of eager students sitting in front of us.
The elementary education that WomenSafe provides focuses on how to have healthy relationships. At the younger level, this looks like having conversations about asking for help, identifying trusting adults, working through different emotions, and asking for permission. It was inspiring to see how the students built upon their knowledge from previous years’ lessons.
The kids were always more engaged than I anticipated. I was in awe of how much information they were able to absorb over the course of a few weeks. Not only were they interested in exploring healthy relationships, they were quick learners.
“Who’s in charge of your body?” Anne would ask the class.
“Me!!!” they would shout back.
One of my favorite things about teaching the kindergartners, first and second graders is that they haven’t yet developed a sense that there is something wrong with talking about relationships and bodies. They haven’t picked up on the messages society sends us that it is shameful or embarrassing to talk about bodies. At five, six, and seven years old, the kids would willingly shout the words “penis” and “vulva” when we talked about body parts. We know that being able to use anatomically correct language for body parts plays a big part in child sex abuse prevention. There is power in language, and these kids felt very empowered to speak the truth about their bodies.
The older the kids got, the more the giggles started to bubble up around topics like sexuality, sexual harassment, and sexual assault. You could see that the students felt more nervous to voice things aloud like sexual violence; they looked around the room anxiously, bowed their heads, puffed up their faces and wrang their hands. With this materialization of the shame, embarrassment, and stigma around talking about sexual and domestic violence came some of the most thoughtful questions. I adored working with the older elementary and middle school folks because they were ready to ask the important questions:
“Is it possible to not have a gender identity?”
“Can you explain more about how someone can transition?”
“Is it bad to masturbate before you go through puberty?”
“What could you do if you were dating somebody who wasn’t out yet, and you wanted to respect their privacy but also felt like you couldn’t be in a relationship where you had to hide?”
The conversations that arose from our lessons were something that I never saw in the schools I attended growing up. In Illinois, we had sex-ed for a half-year in elementary school, half-year in middle school, and another half-year in high school. We never got to explore sexuality or gender, and we certainly were not talking about consent. My experience with sex education and violence prevention as a student led me to believe that the students I would work with in Vermont would be disrespectful and disengaged when talking about sexual and domestic violence. Maybe it’s the time that has passed since I was in school, maybe it’s the part of the country, or maybe it’s the education that these students have been continuously receiving, but they were nothing like kids that I grew up with. I could not have been more impressed with each and every student.
My first month in schools in Addison County made me invigorated to continue to spread the message about healthy relationships. I have full faith in the generations coming of age that they will be safer and kinder friends and partners than those who came before them. In a world where violent men are in power, rape culture permeates college campuses, and emotional vulnerability is shamed, these kids make me feel hopeful. At WomenSafe, we’re committed to the fact that everyone has a role in ending sexual and domestic violence, even kindergartners. Every time a child asks for help, communicates their boundaries, asks for consent, supports their friend, we are one step closer to a violence-free world.
By Linnea Johnson / (she/her/they/them) / Advocate & Educator
