Of Birds, Bees, and Gratitude

Richa Kumari is a Chicago-based consultant, trainer, and author specializing in leadership and diversity issues.

(April is National Sexual Abuse Awareness Month. The article below is on the subject of sex education and abuse prevention.)

One beautiful summer day, when I was in 10th grade, we walked into our classroom for our regular biology lesson and found that something strange was going on. Our biology teacher, Ms. K, gave us a flustered grin and said there was a special guest that day — someone to talk to us about the birds and the bees.

What happened next was a lesson in how not to do it. The guest speaker was visibly uncomfortable. The euphemisms piled up. The questions we actually had — the ones that mattered — went unasked, because the room had been made so awkward that asking them felt impossible. We left the classroom having learned almost nothing, which was, in its way, the most instructive part of the experience.

Years later, the gratitude came into focus: not for that particular lesson, but for the adults who did it right — the ones who answered questions directly, who used accurate language, who treated young people as capable of understanding their own bodies. Research consistently shows that children who receive honest, age-appropriate sex education are better equipped to recognize inappropriate behavior, to name it, and to tell a trusted adult about it. Accurate language is itself a protective factor: a child who knows the correct names for body parts can describe what happened to them.

Abuse thrives in silence and euphemism. The uncomfortable classroom — the flustered grin, the unasked questions — is the same culture that abusers depend on. Teaching children the real words is not encouraging anything; it is giving them the vocabulary of self-protection.

That is why April matters. Awareness months come and go, but the work they name — replacing silence with accurate, age-appropriate honesty — belongs in every month's biology class.