THERE are men on social media who like to ask Nicola Sturgeon if she has ever had anal sex. And who think this is clever and funny, even politically justified.

Crazy, right? Sure, but, honestly, not unusually so. Our outgoing first minister – like any enduring female leader of any political persuasion – inspires abuse that is somehow as banal as it is bizarre.

Wackadoodles – however bonkers – are rarely very original.

Don’t worry, I am not going to feign horror or surprise that our political discourse – online and off – has sunk this low. By now we should all know how boors and bigots, blowhards and balloons, thrive on the internet.

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But as distasteful as it sounds, I think it is worth stopping and having a wee think about why some creeps, cranks and cretins became obsessed, at least rhetorically, with Ms Sturgeon’s sex life. Or rather how they rationalise this misbehaviour.

It is because of the Scottish Government’s schools health and well-being census, what some journalists have dubbed the “SNP’s controversial sex survey”. The abusive logic goes something like this: “If Nicola thinks she can ask weans dodgy questions then we should be able to do the same to her.”

Except such an analogy just does not work, not at all, not even a bit. Only senior pupils were asked about sex, and certainly not in public, or by the First Minister. Young people did not even need to fill out the private and confidential survey (they or their parents or carers could opt out). And they could skip any question they did not want to answer.

These older teenagers should – in my view – also have had the right to take part. They have voices too. Many of these senior phase students can vote, marry, work, pay taxes. Even the fourth years – the survey was for S4, S5 and S6 – have agency and deserve respect.

The crude jokes about Ms Sturgeon served to misinform, to confuse, to enrage.

They were just part of a wider campaign – I think we can call it that – to undermine an effort to understand all sorts of issues facing children and young people, including poverty, bullying, gambling, drugs, booze and sex.

The Herald: A typical school classroomA typical school classroom (Image: PA)

Key influencers implied that teachers, education officials and even politicians were effectively pushing porn on kids. Twitter, Facebook and other platforms brimmed with ugly words like “nonce” and “paedo”.

The organiser of a rally to “stop the survey”, who goes by the online handle Glasgow Cabbie, declared on Twitter that sex education was nothing “short of perverted grooming”.

That was absurd, shameful hyperbole, a libel on an entire profession.

Why would authorities survey young people on things like sex? Prurience? No. Educators need to design services and lessons – including on sexual health and relationships – for their students based on hard data, not wishful thinking.

There is nothing new about welfare surveys, and even questions about sex. True, this one was supposed to be a Scotland-wide census rather than local sampling. And it did ask about specific forms of intercourse, which seems to have triggered some of the shrillest and creepiest critics.

Not everyone who had concerns about the census was pushing QAnon-style conspiracy theories about paedophiles.

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The children’s commissioner, Bruce Adamson, back in late 2021 said he was worried that young people filling out the surveys – in which they give their candidate number – could be identified.

Authorities were in a tricky position: they were responsible for both the well-being of children (and therefore obligated to act if they saw something that suggested a minor was vulnerable) and for carrying out the anonymised survey.

Now, this sounds like a legitimate topic of discussion. Serious and responsible news media, including this paper and the BBC, picked up the issue and covered it. But sober reflections on the design of the questionnaire were drowned out by the online campaign arguing that just talking to teenagers about sex was simply “wrong”.

It was this internet narrative, I think, that coloured some of news coverage.

Journalists, politicians and public-sector communicators should be asking hard questions about why US-style internet culture warriors – including those vulnerable to extremist messaging – are being allowed to set the agenda.

Scotland’s online politics already poses a misinformation risk. We may also have a disinformation threat on some of the big wedge issues we face as a society. Let’s sober up.

How did the anti-sex-survey campaign end? Well, we found out this week. Only 16 of Scotland’s 32 councils took part in the national census. This means our public sector does not have access to gold-standard data on all sorts of welfare issues involving school pupils, not just sex. The result? Young people will suffer.

The numbers we do have tell important stories. So 14% of those youngsters able to take part said they had had penetrative sex. Of these, nearly half had not used a condom. Young people in poorer areas were less likely to have protection.

That is pretty serious. It tells us sex education is needed, and that it is needed most in deprived areas.

Glasgow – with some of the least privileged communities in Scotland – was one of the councils that did not buckle under the online onslaught and tabloid headlines. Credit to the city.

Its final report, published last night, has some chilling details.

Nearly two out of five Glasgow children who took part in the survey said they at least sometimes went to bed hungry. For 3%, it was always.

People, if you want to get angry on behalf of children, this is what you should focus on, not your culture wars hogwash.

There was another grim stat. Fully 30% of Glasgow young people said they had been bullied (of these 38% said they had been targeted on the internet).

It is not just politicians who are abused or asked about their sex life online. Children are too.