I really feel sorry for young girls today having been so badly educated on boy/girl relations. First let me provide this for context and then come back to what I wish to say: ‘Need to reflect on this’: Victorian schools respond to movement calling for better consent education.

Several Victorian schools have issued messages to parents in response to a deluge of sexual assault claims made by young women across the country who voiced their stories as part of a movement demanding better education around consent.

Private schools Xavier College and Geelong Grammar School wrote to their school communities this week after a petition started by Sydney woman Chanel Contos called for sexual consent to be taught in schools from a young age.

It saw hundreds of young women come forward with disturbing allegations of sexual assault and rape from their time as students or soon after, with many describing being forced to perform sex acts or being assaulted while intoxicated or passed out.

However, before reading another word, you should look at the 79 pages of these disturbing allegations. We are dealing with what is potentially a lost generation, and of both young girls and young boys. These are basically high school girls and the best they can think to ask for is that “sexual consent to be taught in schools from a young age”.

I have no idea what the answer here is, but I imagine there are quite a large number of young women who buy into sexual relations at far too young an age and with no idea what their destination is. I know I am old (really ancient) but no one went out with someone else unless they were perhaps thinking this might be the preliminaries of love, children and a marriage unto death. And this from the age of around 13 or 14. No one was messing around, and if you were, both as a male or female, your dating life was almost certain to be brought to an end. Reputation was all.

Consent in my day came with a set of commitments that no one would dare breach. I imagine happiness and fulfilment even today come with similar sets of commitments.

But we live in a post-Monica-Lewinski world, pornography is everywhere and available across the net, and we have, right now, the example of the American Vice-President having slept her way to the top. Beyond even that, there is now birth-control and failing that, abortion almost on demand.

At the moment, the supposed issue is in relation to camper/staff relations among the backroom people in Parliament House. Everything about the way the story has unfolded looks as if it is intended to influence how people vote. The two issues need to be separated, but that is very unlikely to happen when our news media make these stories the feature political issues of the day.

The people who run these stories are evil people whose political morals make me sick. They do it to get more people to vote for Labor and fewer to vote for the Coalition. How to get boys and girls to show greater respect and, dare I say it, more modesty and common sense in their first approaches to dealing with each other sexually, must be the aim. How to get there is completely beyond me, other than to keep these issues away from politics.