Girls and boys are having sex earlier and earlier and many of them regret

Girls and boys are having sex earlier and earlier and many of them regret this as they get older.Left-wing liberals will shout for for more sex education; right-wingers will shout for less. The solution lies in a more fundamental reformation of attitudes to sex and love in British society. We must find ways of making sex less prurient and aggressively public and commercial and at the same time we must strive to make it normal by learning to talk about it to our children without embarrassment or false jollity. Sex is just one part of what it means to be human, but human sex is different from the mating of beasts because we make choices and those choices have serious consequences for individuals and societies.This is something which other countries, and minorities within Britain, seem able to teach their young and it is a lesson which we must begin to teach to those in this country who are, at present, rushing into a brutalising future, one which may be far worse than anything that the late Mrs Whitehouse warned of.y.alibhai-brown independent.co.uk
More from Yasmin Alibhai-Brown. As Saturday’s suicide bomb attacks ought to have reminded us, the Israelis are not the only obstacle to peace in the Middle East. The bombers did not blow themselves up in order to encourage a just settlement with the Palestinians. They were prepared to die to help to make a settlement impossible.

They intended to discredit peacemakers of both nationalities, and to polarise politics on all sides. Their hope is for a continuing intifada, continuing repression, then a final, sanguinary outcome in which Israel went the way of the World Trade Centre. At least as regards the continuous violence, they may succeed. That impatience is understandable, but is it realistic? It is an easy mood to indulge in when looking at small scale maps in far off capitals, but the nearer the approach to the region, the rougher the landscape appears. Though the acreage may not be that great, it has provided a big enough cockpit for centuries of warfare, with no sign that its potential is exhausted. After all, it is supposed to be the battleground for Armageddon.The danger is that those who are currently exasperated will rapidly become discouraged when they are brought up against the complexities of peace-making For we have been here before.

Over three decades, the Israelis have become experts at charting – and manipulating – the mood swings of American administrations, knowing that the electoral cycle will always encourage infirmity of purpose. The Palestinians have also learnt how to procrastinate, and with them, there is a further problem. Does Yasser Arafat still speak for anyone, and if not, who does?Starting from moral first principles is pointless. In 1948, the state of Israel had no right to come into being, in as much as the Jews had no right to expropriate a single acre of Palestinian land.

They could have claimed a right to expropriate territory and much else from Germany, but all their sufferings at the hands of the Germans did not entitle them to dispossess Palestinians. Yet their new state was necessarily founded on dispossession.Fifty years on, all that is solely relevant to understanding the problem, not to crafting a solution. The Israelis have long since altered the facts on the ground. After all, most states were originally founded on dispossession, and were merely luckier in that the dispossessed either assimilated or died out or went quietly somewhere else. The Israelis are almost uniquely unfortunate in having so many of the dispossessed – plus even more of their descendants – living in squalid, terror-genic conditions just across the border.Even so, and despite the refugee camps, the changing facts on the ground have moral implications as well as geopolitical ones.