THAT KIND OF GIRL: Homeschooling and Female Sexual Health

Record: Madalyn Doucet Vicry, “That Kind of Girl: Effects of Homeschooling on the Sexual Health of Women and Girls” in Georgetown Journal of Gender and Law 18, no. 1 (March 2017). [Abstract Here]

Summary: Doucet, who herself was homeschooled in a conservative Christian environment first through twelfth grade, is a recent graduate of Georgetown Law and is now a district law clerk at U.S. District Courts.  Here she provides a critique of conservative Christian homeschooling’s approach to sex education and some recommendations for reform.

She begins with a history of the homeschooling movement, which she derives largely from my book, emphasizing the history of the conservative Protestant wing of the movement.  Emerging from this history is an ideology, Doucet claims, that is opposed to any government oversight of the family or of children, opposed to progressive ideals like gender equality and ideological pluralism, and counter-cultural in its attempt to have conservative Christian principles inform every aspect of life.

When it comes to sexuality, Doucet’s own ideal stresses knowledge of sexual function and dysfunction, a positive outlook that respects individual choices, and equality between partners.  Conservative homeschooling, claims Doucet, fails on all three counts.  She succinctly summarizes the difference as “knowledge versus censorship, positivity versus shame, and equality versus patriarchy.” (p. 112).  The bulk of Doucet’s article is concerned with documenting the conservative Christian homeschooling world’s commitment to censorship, shame, and patriarchy.  The detail and accuracy of these sections reveal how deeply Doucet herself was immersed in this culture for her entire childhood.  Readers familiar with the ex-patrio blogosphere will find many of the sources Doucet uses here very familiar.

After documenting the harms conservative Christian homeschooling inflicts on children’s sexual development, Doucet suggests some reforms.  First, she’d like to have more resources available for homeschooled children to learn about the harms of their tradition’s views of sexuality and to learn about more healthy alternatives.  Second, she’d love increased regulations, but she well understands that that’s not really politically viable, so she opts instead for carrot-based approaches that would allow homeschoolers to access state funding or public school services in exchange for providing age-appropriate and healthy sex education.  Finally, and most importantly for Doucet, she’d like to see the rights of homeschooled children given equal billing to those of their parents.  She’d like courts to consider not only educational neglect and physical abuse but also student sexual health when determining whether or not a family’s homeschooling situation is in the child’s best interests.

Appraisal:  Back in 2009 legal scholar Robin West caused a stir when she published an article titled “The Harms of Homeschooling.” I critiqued that article here and here.  The most significant problem I noted with West’s argument, and this has been a recurring problem with other legal arguments against homeschooling, is that it was not grounded in an empirically recognizable depiction of actual homeschooling practice.  Well, this article is.  Doucet is a much more effective expositor of the “harms” of homeschooling, because she was homeschooled k-12 and knows the culture from deep within.  Past critics have created hypothetical scenarios or provided perhaps a single isolated anecdote to justify their reform proposals.  Doucet goes into rich detail to make a bracing case that conservative Christian homeschooling does objective harm to children’s sexual development.

Back in 2010 Robert Putnam and David Campbell wrote a remarkable book called American Grace: How Religion Divides and Unites Us.  That book provided, among other things, a history of how Americans grew so divided religiously.  The main thing that did it, argue Putnam and Campbell, was sex.  The country’s leftward move in the 1970s and ever after toward more and more openness to sexual expression was the single most powerful instigator of the religious right backlash.  What Doucet valorizes–sexual knowledge, sex positivity, and sexual equality—are the very things fueling the conservative reaction against modernity.  What this means is that Doucet is probably right to stress sexual health as the main harm of conservative homeschooling.  Christian conservatives, for their part, are likely to respond that what Doucet calls sexual health is unbiblical and sinful and exactly what children should be protected from.

Milton Gaither

Messiah College