Not every census with questions mentioning teen sex is an outrage

My first response was an ambivalent one. At one level, it instantly evoked the general chaos, confusion and neediness of my own adolescence – except in crisp bureaucratese.

“Attitude to school; perception of achievement; eating behaviours; sleep pattern; relationship with peers; body image; sedentary behaviour; places to play; experience of bullying; aspirations and career planning; relationships and sexual health … ” And much more besides.

I cast my mind back to the late seventies (my own period of schoolyard adolescence). It would have been a marvel to me that St Ambrose (Roman Catholic Comprehensive) would be remotely this concerned about the texture of my life, in all its Hobbesian fury.

The nearest I got to such pastoral attention was my history teacher, Mr Dempsey. Jimmy made his classroom a sanctuary for sensitives and weirdos like myself, as the playtime wars of normativity raged around us.

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Also, I recall a Jesuitical Father who raised interesting topics – dinosaurs in evolution, baby-making – only to wrap them in the coils of scripture or hint at other, more transcendent uplands. All of which was of no use to me, waking up with cardboard pyjamas three mornings in a row.

So one side of my ambivalence is a massive sigh of relief for current Scottish teens. What for me 40-odd years ago were perplexing, dangerous badlands, look now to be a mapped terrain – or at least, something the grown-ups now want to know about. From the perspective of the still-wobbly 1978 teen inside me, this is manifest progress.

Yet I have a contending response – and which I suppose could be part of the consternation around the “relationships and sexual health” questions, which ask about specific teenage sexual behaviours and acts. I’m wondering whether an adolescence so anticipated and embraced is actually an adolescence at all.

I did a wee survey of the youth in my vicinity, who reported only embarrassment at sex education in school (flushed teachers rolling condoms over bananas, etc). They also confessed they’d found out more about the mechanics and consequences of their equipment in late-night discussions on school trips (“I mean discovering masturbation! Just the most brilliant idea!” reported one to me).

Certainly some of the most luminous hours of my existence so far have been my teenage explorations of sexuality: each unfolding and uncovered moment an unforgettable epic of surprises (and mostly, delights). Other than clear guidelines on how to avoid procreation, would I have wanted too much foreknowledge of all this? Does the “maturing” part of adolescence happen without mistakes, experiments, steps into a void?

But my young respondents also soberly reminded me that they’ve grown up in the pornotopia of the internet. They have access to a bounty of digitally streamed sexual performance, where one specific and relentless act leads to another, algorithms in dutiful service.

Instruction may intertwine with destruction in these experiences. Certainly the destruction of the mystery as I experienced it, but also the destruction of the sheer intersubjective joy of the act. That sex might be something more than just the collision of bodily objects (although of course, sometimes bodily objects just want to collide).

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So could we imagine a “sexual health” education that confidently negotiated all these rocks in the great stream? That counselled both safety and exploration – the unstressed development of sexual identity, within a wider framework of ensuring the general “wellbeing” of youth?

Worth a go, and on ye go. Also, just to say, that such a Health and Wellbeing Census for Schoolchildren (with questions on sexual behaviour) is hardly something unique to the Scottish Government. Especially for those who cast it as the eye of Mordor, relentlessly scanning Scottish life for intimacies to administer.

For example, take the HBSC – not a bank, but the World Health Organisation’s regular survey on Health Behaviour in School-Age Children. It’s been running since 1982, now covering 50 countries. It also must have been the basis for the Scottish census, so coincident are their categories. “Body image”, “bullying and fighting”, “self-rated health” – and yes, “sexual behaviour”.

Similar to some of Sturgeon’s justifications yesterday, the HBSC presents itself as a global research resource for better policy, in the areas of schoolchildren’s health and flourishing. Oh dear, the Scottish Government again caught benchmarking themselves against world-class standards of policy excellence. When will they learn, ochone, etc.

Yet there’s an element of this stramash which does tap into some deeper worries I have about Scottish “governmentality”. I’m trying to use this word with some precision. The French thinker Michel Foucault coined it to mean all the methods that governments deploy to get us to govern ourselves – which include the knowledge they generate about us, as well as the laws and policies they lay down.

Now, Michel always thought in terms of DeGaulle’s goons stamping on Parisian hippies on May 1968: that’s not relevant to Scotland 2021. But what we must attend to is the tendency for the Scottish Government to assume that Scottish society and culture is essentially their “governable” entity – even, indeed especially, for its own good. (Or for “optimal outcomes”, as the civil servants might say).

The “Team Scotland” phrase that sometimes slips out from leading politicians – as if our infinite, multiform Scotland was like some manageable workplace squad – is the crudest version of the assumption.

It's this (largely well-intentioned) mindset which, I think, causes these regular missteps from the Scottish Government, often rendered as a creeping authoritarianism. The idea that children assenting to fill in this Wellbeing and Health Census will not have complete anonymity (being identifiable by their School Candidate Number), and may trigger the concern of local government social services by the pattern of their answers, is wrong and self-subverting.

How usefully candid would these responses be, if the form-filler knew that they might trigger a visit from a social worker? Doesn’t this disrespect the dignity and integrity of children? Much of the pushback against this current census mentions the Named Persons debacle of five years ago.

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Remember? Scottish families faced the prospect of being permanently subject to what was, effectively, a “state parent” – independently monitoring the welfare of their child. The UK’s Supreme Court ruled against this legislation, to the chagrin of the then leading party.

Again, I believe the instincts of care and prevention of harm pulse considerably stronger than any authoritarian impulse from the Scottish Government. But perhaps the worldly and external demands of independence on the political classes – the need to grapple with climate crisis, economics, radical technologies, a world on the move – will be the best remedy for all this.

That powers over care, health, social behaviours and education have dominated devolution has not been a bad thing. We are probably in the vanguard of nations who take the aspirations of “wellbeing” policy seriously.

But couldn’t we do with a rebalancing of attention – say, towards matters of Scotland’s collective path through an unstable world-system and the excellence we need to traverse it? At least stories of these endeavours would contend with more social matters, letting attainment jostle with catastrophising.

Herbert Marcuse once quipped: “Not every problem a boyfriend has with his girlfriend is due to the capitalist mode of production”. Equally, not every census with questions about teenage sex in it is a civilisational outrage.

Deep breath, love them whatever’s happening with their sprouting and exploding bodies, then move on. And up.