Garth George: Sex play enough to ruin your breakfast appetite

It takes quite a bit to put me off my breakfast but a story in the Herald last week came close. It told me that children as young as 4 were engaging in adult sexual behaviour in Playcentres, playgrounds and primary schools.

The disturbing behaviour ranged from pulling down pants to sex acts.

The story was tucked away on an inside page, which perhaps explains the lack of reaction, particularly from those to whom such an item is a Pavlovian trigger to sit down and write another "Oh woe is us" letter to the editor.

It seems that in the Bay of Plenty, Tauranga Help, a "sexual abuse, counselling and education centre" has noted a 400 per cent increase in such behaviour over the past six months.

And it wants to introduce "awareness and prevention" programmes into schools because "research shows" that "early detection often prevents more serious offending in later life".

A Tauranga child psychotherapist reckons that "it is important to differentiate between a child's sexual curiosity and abnormal behaviour", although it seems that we're talking about 4-year-olds here.

She also reckons that this sort of behaviour is either by children who have been victims of sexual abuse imitating those events, or unexposed children drawn in by sexual abuse victims. Which seems to be an oversimplification to me considering that the Western Bay Playcentre Association is allowing Tauranga Help to run workshops with its 3 and 4-year-olds "on a broad range of topics, including appropriate sexual behaviour".

Pray tell me what is appropriate sexual behaviour - or even sexual curiosity - in a little one aged 3 or 4?

At about the same time, the Herald reported the tale of the row between factions of the board of trustees of Wellington's Seatoun Primary School over the activities of a religious studies group, which has torn a once close-knit community apart.

The weekly KidsKlub meetings, held at lunchtime and attended by a third of the school's 400 pupils, were voluntary and were based on Scripture Union programmes which dealt with values and relationships and involved scripture, craft, stories and role-playing.

They had been running without complaint for two years before a new board was elected and dumped the meetings, apparently because it felt the content was inappropriate.

I wonder what's inappropriate about learning some traditional values and a bit of scripture with a few stories and some role-playing thrown in?

Then there was the story about the director of the International Film Festival being confident that a film described as the most sexually explicit to go on mainstream release will screen next month despite an attempt to have it banned. We were told that the film, called Nine Songs, "features graphic unsimulated sex scenes, including penetration, masturbation and oral sex". It has been given an R18 rating by chief "censor" Bill Hastings, paving the way for it to be shown at the festival.

The Society for the Promotion of Community Standards has, of course, taken the matter to the Film and Literature Board of Review on the grounds that the film is objectionable, but recent history would suggest that the society has a snowball's chance in hell of winning its appeal. And, anyway, what on earth could be objectionable about a man and a woman having sex in full living colour on a movie screen?

Then, in the Weekend Herald, we learn that in the United States there is (another) burgeoning national crisis - a rise in violent behaviour among girls.

The FBI said the number of girls aged between 10 and 17 (yes, Virginia, at 17 you're still a girl) arrested for aggravated assault has doubled over the past 20 years. The number of boys arrested for weapons possession rose 22 per cent between 1983 and 2003, and the number of girls arrested increased 125 per cent. And school playgrounds across the nation where boy bullies once reigned have become battlegrounds for skirmishes between girls.

Part of this shift in violent behaviour, reports Julie Scelfo, of Newsweek, is down to evolving masculine-feminine roles, helped along by girls being bombarded with images of "sheroes" in movies and on TV which gives them aggressive, dominating role models and tacit permission to alter their behaviour.

"The women's movement," she writes, "which explicitly encourages women to assert themselves like men, has unintentionally opened the door to violent behaviour."

Over in France, the alleged mastermind of a vast paedophilia ring has denied charges that he raped children and forced them into prostitution. He is but one of 66 men and women accused of abusing or causing to be abused 45 children between the ages of 6 months and 14 years.

Back in New Zealand 18,511 abortions were performed in 2003. Which means that potential New Zealand citizens were disposed of at a rate of nearly 51 a day, seven days a week, every week that year.

Is there a connection between these apparently unrelated events? You tell me. It's certainly worth thinking about.