‘An outrage’: controversy in Spain over campaign that teaches 3-year-olds to masturbate

A group of Christian lawyers filed an injunction before a Spanish court against the distribution of a pamphlet that teaches 3-year-old children to masturbate as part of an "educational program," local media reported Wednesday.

The legal association Christian Lawyers claimed before the Contentious-Administrative High Court of Justice of Catalonia (TSJC) that the program "violates the fundamental right to the protection of youth and childhood, and the right of parents to decide on the education of their children."

The affective-sexual education plan, Govern 'Coeduca't, which started in 2019-2020, aims to "help educational centers to enhance and make visible the gender perspective, coeducation and affective-sexual education," as read on its website.

The president of Govern 'Coeduca't, Pere Aragonès, has defended the "sex education" program and considers it essential for Catalan children and young people. In addition, he believes that "in fact, it should be expanded."

According to the political leader, the program is carried out so that young people can know that there can be a sex-affective education "based on respect, on people's rights, on the culture of consent and equality between men and women."

These workshops, which are disseminated in thousands of schools from kindergarten to high school, contain material that teaches children from 3 to 5 years old to masturbate, which according to the Christian association took the issue to court: it is an "aberration." 

These initiatives, which allegedly promote masturbation in schools among three-year-olds, pornography consumption among eight-year-olds, oral sex among 12-year-olds, and games that attempt to disassociate gender assignment from genitalia, are already in a thousand educational centers, according to the Spanish newspaper ABC.  

The content of the pamphlet is compiled from a guide that includes images taken from the "pleasure kit" page of the Sidaestudi association, an organization that receives more than 300,000 euros in government subsidies each year so that the editions can be multiplied, the media outlet reported.