That's a Big No-No

By Rachael

There is a video I have been thinking about, which I have not seen and which almost no one has seen, though it has now been described in an official letter from the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Health, which has spent this past year reading other people's curricula. The video belongs to Fact Forward, a nonprofit in Columbia, South Carolina, which has been doing this work since 1994 and which lost a $1.6 million grant this summer. In the video, as its director describes it, one girl tells another girl a secret, the oldest secret there is, and the second girl answers the way girls have answered that secret since before there were letters or offices, which is to say she tells her friend that what she has done is forbidden. That's a big no-no. A confession and a scolding, and nothing else that anyone outside the office has ever described. Someone watched it through, more than once I imagine, and then wrote down that what could not be paid for with public money was not the deed and not the scolding but the fact that the deed had been said out loud, by a girl, to a girl, and the letter went out, and I have been thinking ever since about what that letter believes it is preventing.