“Brainwashing” by sex educators responsible for child suicides, says Polish education minister

Sex educators should take responsibility for their “brainwashing” causing suicides among young people, says Poland’s education minister, Przemysław Czarnek. A child who does not identify with their assigned sex needs to be helped, not reinforced in making an “anthropological error”, he adds.

In an interview with public broadcaster Polskie Radio, Czarnek was asked about alleged comments from unnamed schoolteachers who complain that “children are abused during adolescence” when “they don’t always identify with their gender but this is encouraged so that girls recognise themselves as boys and vice versa”.

“This is extreme moral corruption and wickedness on the part of so-called sex educators, supported by MPs from [Civic] Platform and The Left,” Czarnek replied, referring to Poland’s two largest opposition parties, which have opposed the government’s efforts to restrict sex education in schools.

“A child who has problems of this kind should actually be helped, and not affirmed in the belief that… [this] anthropological error is actually correct,” continued the minister.

“If you brainwash a child, then, later on, you should take responsibility for all these suicide attempts, for the psychological problems of children, because they result precisely from the fact that children are morally corrupted by people we do not want to let into schools,” added Czarnek.

The ruling national-conservative Law and Justice (PiS) party is currently seeking to pass a law that would centralise government control over schools, with the intention in particular of preventing outside groups from having access to children. Opposition MPs have protested against the plans.

Czarnek said earlier this year that the new system is necessary to “protect children from moral corruption”. Last year, he specifically identified one voluntary sex education programme in an opposition-controlled city as “morally corrupting”.

While the number of suicide attempts among minors recorded by the police has been increasing in Poland in recent years, there is no study showing a link between sex education and higher rates of suicidal behaviour among young people.

Experts point out that the lack of available psychological help, overburdened and under-resourced psychiatric hospitals, and the consequences of the pandemic are mainly responsible.

International research has shown higher rates of suicide among young transgender people than their peers. However, scholars suggest that the way to tackle this problem is to provide greater support, inclusion, affirmation and tolerance for transgender youths.

PiS has in recent years led a vociferous campaign against what it calls “LGBT ideology” and “gender ideology”. In recent weeks, the party’s chairman, Jarosław Kaczyński, has repeatedly criticised the idea that people can declare their own gender.

The education minister’s latest remarks came as Gazeta Wyborcza, a leading liberal daily, published a report on the difficult situation in psychiatric hospitals for children in Poland.

It found that, at the Warsaw Children’s Clinical Hospital, children sleep on mattresses spread out in the corridor because there are not enough beds.

“We had the last vacancy on the ward in August,” said the head of the hospital’s department of child psychiatry, Tomasz Wolańczyk. “For a long time, we have only accepted urgent cases. These are patients after suicide attempts. In 2021, the number of suicide attempts among children increased two to three times in Europe compared to 2019.”

Main photo credit: Ministerstwo Rodziny i Polityki Społecznej / flickr.com (under CC BY 2.0)

Alicja Ptak

Alicja Ptak is senior editor at Notes from Poland and a multimedia journalist. She previously worked for Reuters.