Why we shouldn't shrink from sex

THE strange case of the disappearing Euro-nipple says a lot about British attitudes to sex. In the European elections last year, a poster which featured an apparently innocuous family group went up on billboards all over the EU. The idea was to encourage all adult members of the family to take an interest in European politics and exercise their right to vote.

The only problem for the Brits was that the woman featured in the poster was - shock horror - breastfeeding a baby. Even worse, one of her nipples was clearly visible.

This led to British objections on the grounds of taste and decency. So suitably doctored versions of the poster appeared on UK billboards - minus the offending nipple - while the rest of Europe wondered what the fuss was about.

It is those very divergent views about all things sexual that fascinate Durham University academic Dr Lutz Sauerteig. The historian has embarked on a major research project comparing the way the English and the Germans teach their children about sex. Funded by the Wellcome Trust, Dr Sauerteig will compare and contrast the materials used in the UK and in Germany to teach youngsters about the perennially tricky subject.

With the UK topping the European league for teenage pregnancies - and the North-East the leading region in England - something about the way we deliver sex education to our children is not working.

Modernisers and progressives in Britain would like to see sex education given a more prominent place on the school curriculum and look to practices in places like the Netherlands. At the same time, many UK traditionalists believe that while the basic biological facts can be given, the issue of sex education is one for the family to handle.

A recent conference at Durham University which looked at a cultural history of sex education during the 20th century concluded that Scandinavian countries like Denmark and Sweden pioneered sex education in the developed world. Dr Sauerteig, who organised the April conference, said the delegates from many countries agreed there was a sliding scale of countries, with liberal Sweden at one end and religiously-dominated Italy at the other.

"If Germany was somewhere in the middle, England was more towards the restricted side," says Dr Sauerteig, who is part of the university's Centre for the History of Medicine and Disease at Stockton. "The different national attitudes have to do with whether we agree with a nanny state implementing sex education on a compulsory basis or whether it should be private and the task of the parent."

"While this is a valid view, it may not be the best way to go if you want seriously to tackle the issue of teenage pregnancies and increasing rates of sexually transmitted diseases."

While many admire the frank, non-prudish approach to sex education adopted in many western European countries, Dr Sauerteig points out that there is increasing evidence that something is going seriously wrong on the other side of the English Channel too.

"The latest figures show that there is a steady increase of VD rates in all European countries. All those safe sex messages in the 1980s seem to have been forgotten," he says.

Closer to home, the most recent official figures showed a 9.7 per cent annual increase in new cases of sexually transmitted infections in the North-East of England in the last year, a much higher rate than the national figure.

Dr Sauerteig, who came to Durham from Freiburg University in Germany two years ago, is something of an authority in the field of sex education.

"I became interested in this subject when I researched the history of VD and the way that this public health problem was tackled from the 1880s to the 1930s," he says.

The growing appreciation that something needed to be done to curb rising rates of venereal disease in the late 19th century - and acceptance that the most sexually active are people in their late teens and early 20s - eventually led to the tentative establishment of formal sex education in schools.

But the emphasis always tended to be on the biological side and not so much on the emotional side of sexual relations - and definitely not on enjoyment. That was to come much later.

In terms of public health measures, Germany led the way compared to England. Dr Sauerteig has discovered that as early as 1910, vending machines dispensing condoms were stationed in army barracks in Bavaria. In the 1920s, a so-called 'ablution centre' for men who suspected they might have become infected with VD was opened in Manchester, but this experiment provoked criticism and it closed within a year.

In his new research, Dr Sauerteig has already investigated the literature used in formal and informal sex education in Germany. Over the next three years, he will concentrate on analysing materials used in the UK.

In Germany, a girls' magazine called Bliss which appeared in the 1950s pioneered a column giving factual information about sexual matters. It was followed by a much bolder magazine called Bravo.

Initially aimed at boys, it became popular with both sexes and began to perform a role which would be unthinkable for a UK boys' magazine at that time.

"I think that for the UK, that would have been pretty unusual," says Dr Sauerteig, who is interested to see if he can find a British equivalent.

"They started having an agony aunt in the mid 1960s, someone pretending to be a medical doctor. They realised that young people had lots of questions about sexuality and growing up."

Bravo was probably the most important source of information about sexual matters outside of the German school system says Dr Sauerteig.

"Apart from the agony aunt, Bravo featured regular articles on different aspects of sex. How to kiss and so on. Some of the photographs were very explicit," he says.

Unusually, the emphasis in Bravo was that sex was something that could be enjoyed. The magazine still exists and an estimated 60 per cent of German youngsters continue to read it today.

Apart from magazines like Bravo, it was also common for German parents to buy one of a number of popular paperback books about sex education to give to their children. "My own parents bought something for me," recalls Dr Sauerteig.

In general terms, he believes that England does tend to more prudish than Germany. But he says that this does not sit very well with the behaviour you can see in many of our cities on Saturday nights. "If you go down to the Quayside in Newcastle at the weekend, you would not think there was much prudery," he jokes.

Dr Sauerteig points to research that shows many British teenagers are under the influence of alcohol when they have sex, "and they forget about using a condom". In a highly sexualised society, there is also peer pressure from friends to engage in early sex.

But stepping back from his research subject, Dr Sauerteig has no doubt that there are lessons to be learned from our more enlightened neighbours.

"It must be right that in a culture where you can talk about sexuality, where it is easier for children to discuss birth control with their parents and where you can have more open talk about sexuality at school or in the family, you will see lower levels of teenage pregnancies and VD."