Italy’s New Sex Education Bill: What It Gets Wrong About Child Abuse Prevention (And What Parents Can Do)
The stone steps outside my daughter’s after-school art class are still warm from October’s midday sun when Mara pulls me aside. Mara’s a 4th grade teacher at the local primary school, her son and my 10-year-old Mia have been in the same class since they were 6. She twists her phone between her fingers, the screen glowing with a PDF of Italy’s new sex education bill, and says, “They canceled our annual abuse prevention workshop. All of it. Because half the stuff we cover is now labeled propaganda.”
Mia’s leaning against my leg, picking crumbs out of a cannoli she got from the bar down the street, so I step a little away to read the snippet Mara shows me. The new bill groups any teaching that “promotes gender identity not corresponding to biological sex” or “denies the binary of male and female” under the same umbrella of content banned to protect minors from sexual harm. It’s not just that talking about trans kids or same-sex parents is forbidden—administrators are so scared of losing school funding or facing investigation that they’re axing any lesson that touches on bodies, boundaries, or personal safety at all. No one wants to risk it.
That night, Mia asks me over pasta why the boys in her class teased Lila for having two mommies. “They said it’s propaganda,” she says, poking at a meatball. I put my fork down. I remember the abuse prevention workshop Mia attended when she was 8. The instructor spent 10 minutes talking about all different kinds of families, because the point of that lesson wasn’t just to talk about marriage—it was to teach kids that abuse can happen anywhere, even in your own family, even by someone you love, and no family structure is “bad” for making you feel safe to talk. Now that whole section is gone.
I’ve talked to three teachers in the last month about this, and all of them say the same thing: the conflation of “gender propaganda” and harmful sexual content doesn’t just target queer kids and families. It takes away the very tools we use to stop child sexual abuse. Think about it: to teach a kid to recognize abuse, you have to teach them that their body belongs to them. You have to teach them that it’s okay to say no to an adult, even a teacher or a relative, if a touch makes them uncomfortable. You have to normalize talking about bodies, because if kids are shamed for talking about private parts, they won’t tell anyone if something bad happens. If you’re not allowed to talk about how gender and identity work for different people, you can’t teach that autonomy either—everything related to bodies and boundaries becomes taboo.
I’m lucky, I have the time to look up age-appropriate information and weave this stuff into our everyday life. It doesn’t have to be a big awkward talk, either. Last week, when we were getting changed to go swimming, I pointed out that my body is different from Mia’s, different from her dad’s, and that some people’s idea of who they are doesn’t match the body they were born into. That’s just how some people are, I said, same as some people like chocolate and some like vanilla. Then I reminded her: no matter who you are, or what your family looks like, no one gets to touch you in a place you’ve already learned is private, no matter what reason they give. If anything feels weird, you tell me right away, no matter what they tell you to do.
I started doing a quick, five-question check any time Mia goes to a new after-school activity, a sleepover, or a weekend trip with a friend’s family. It takes 30 seconds, no big deal: First, do you feel okay saying no if someone asks you to do something with your body that you don’t like? Second, will you tell me if anything makes you feel uncomfortable, even if they told you not to? Third, do you remember you never have to keep a secret from me, no matter what? Fourth, is there any rule there that doesn’t make sense to you? Fifth, can you call me any time day or night to come get you, and I won’t ask a million questions before we leave? It’s small, but it’s more than a lot of kids are getting right now from their schools.
At a parent meeting last week, a lot of parents were still confused. Most of them had only seen the headlines that said the bill “protects kids from inappropriate ideology” and didn’t know that the abuse prevention lessons their kids were supposed to get this year were already cut. One dad, whose kid is in 2nd grade, said he didn’t care about the politics—he just wanted his daughter to know what to do if a coach or a relative touched her wrong. “How did we end up here,” he said, “where stopping bad people from hurting kids is tied up in all this fighting?”
The bill’s still waiting for a final vote in the senate, and no one’s sure what will happen next. A lot of teachers are quietly slipping boundary lessons into other subjects—gym teachers talk about personal space during warm-ups, English teachers read books with diverse family structures and leave it at that. But they can’t do it openly, and they can’t cover everything that a dedicated abuse prevention unit would. Not all parents have the time or the resources to pick up the slack: in the neighborhood down the hill from us, where most families have two parents working full time, a lot of kids don’t get any of these talks at home. Those are the kids who end up most at risk.
I don’t have a neat solution to the political mess. I just keep doing the small stuff: answering Mia’s questions when she asks, doing that five-question check, reminding her that her body is hers, no matter what anyone says at school or in the news. It’s not enough, but right now, it’s what we’ve got.
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