Sexual harassment should be the concern of parents, school/college authorities, governments, and professional counselors. These agents should work together to give the child a full education that will include the knowledge of himself in the care and preservation of the body.
Parents
Contents
Parents have a close and continuous relationship with their children that no other individual has. They are accessible to their children when they want to ask questions, especially right from the formative year till the time they become a full adult or independent of their own.
Family life also gives them some natural opportunities to increase gradually a child’s understanding of sex in life. It is from the parents that the child receives his or her earlier attitude towards sex.
Parents can help a child to develop standards of personal conduct and the strength to maintain them. They can help a child to form values that will enable him to make wise choices.
He would need these if he succeeded in directing his strong biological urges wisely in meeting the conditional ideas of his peer groups. This method encourages children to live decent lifestyles to serve as role models for their children.
Adults who come from a decent home background rarely fall into the temptations of perpetrators of sexual harassment.
Parents should desist from ensuring the admission of their children into higher institutions, by fraudulent means. This would ensure that only those students who are cognitively ready for the school should be admitted.
Since the school is the second home of the students it is necessary for it to give the child the best he requires in life and to equip him with knowledge of the facts of life. An orientation program for new students is even necessary.
The orientation program should include, basic information about the school, meaning, causes, effects, and implications of sexual harassment as well as the facilitated media or materials for reporting and handling such as an office.
They should also be told in plain language that there is no shortcut to genuine academic success. There should be conduct for students which should be published, available, and distributed to them all.
Secondary schools should put in place distinct guidance and counseling units, staffed with professionals, where students can regularly receive proper counseling, not only in their academic pursuits but also on how they can withstand temptations.
They should also be advised on the mode of dressing that would not expose the sensitive parts of their bodies to the opposite sex. Counseling services, sexuality education, and parenthood programs in schools need to be put in place.
If sex education is introduced in schools properly, it will according to Durojaye (1976) help the early maturing, highly disciplined, and self-controlled adolescents to receive a great deal of information necessary.
It will make them learn how to sublimate sexual urges through the use of wholesome work and recreation to keep the problem at a minimum stage.
This will rescue the normal and underdeveloped sexual appetite of adolescents from being influenced by bad sexual harassment by the early maturing youths who lack self-control.
This also lays the good foundation for marriage and family living and sex roles which put sex into the most natural practices to such an extent that sexual matters will not come between them and the proper study of their books which is their primary duty.
Seminars, conferences, and workshops should be regularly arranged in tertiary institutions during which experts would be invited to deliver papers on such social vices that could mar the future of students, teachers, and administrators, namely sexual harassment, drug abuse, cultism, examination malpractice to mention but a few.
Social and psychological problems arising from boy-girl relationships, marriage, and birth control are some of the contents that should be included in secondary school programs.
Sexuality education according to Essen (1974) could be through seminars and group methods where boys and girls would be able to express their feelings under the teachers’ unconstructive guidelines school administrators and classroom teachers.
HOD or principals should be knowledgeable and vast in the psychology of adolescents to be able to understand their sexual behavior and problems and evolve strategies to deal appropriately or decisively with them.
The fact should be borne in mind that present-day adolescents, apart from their natural inclination for heterosexual relationships are surrounded with whole some influences that conflict with the expectations of the school.
This is why students’ problems have to be handled by those who are trained professionally like guidance counselors.
But there are no counselors’ experienced teachers usually those with very high integrity may be called upon to conduct seminars or hold group discussions as aforementioned with the students who need guidance or information in connection with sexual matters.
Monitoring devices
A complaint monitoring desk should be established within the principal office where cases of victimization about sexual assault could be lodged.
This will encourage students who are experiencing sexual harassment and other problems to report traces of these as early as possible before the injury is done.
Governments
The government should make it a matter of urgency to promote sex education in all its entirety.
That is schools and societies of national function feelings of sin and guilt, fear, morbid introspection, and feelings of wrongdoing and unworthiness are some firms of sexual maladjustment being carried about by our youths who will eventually become the leaders of tomorrow.
This was a ‘psychological’ one and its solution requires an understanding of human sexuality through education.
It would therefore be better if the government could announce a legal sanction on every form of wearing in external cultures.
This will allow for sexual harassment but promote our indigenous traditions, cultures, customs, values, and norms, most especially in encouraging polite communication, decent manners of dressing equipping oneself with moral and good mannish mannerisms inculcating decent sexual habits among many others.
Professional counselors
Professional counselors must create awareness and give specific instructions on the methodology of coping with activities such as making friends with both inter and intra-sexes. This should be done in the appropriate measure through primary and secondary schools.
By the time a child grows to the tertiary school stage, he or she would be well aware of the crucial role social abilities play in the coping processes in interpersonal relationships, especially pre-marital relationships.
No doubt, such instructions, and awareness will also go a long way towards stemming the unfortunate incidents and pains associated with pre-marital sex involved in ignorance.
Editors
adminate
