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Changing and challenging social norms is essential to preventing gendered violence, and education is widely regarded as a key means through which this can happen. Whilst good-quality research exploring the outcomes of such educational interventions exists, very little is known about what actually happens inside educational spaces aiming to instigate change. This gap limits understandings of how and why change does (or does not) happen. This paper aims to address this by providing an opportunity to peer into a ‘space for change’. To do this, observational data are analysed from a non-formal education programme aiming to empower girls to be free from violence in Kenya. Three moments are explored which illustrate ‘empowerment’, ‘subversion’ and ‘resistance’. The paper also explores the often hidden stories of the facilitators, showing that who teaches can be as important as the curriculum used in determining what happens inside educational spaces for change.

Within the context of sexuality education as an HIV prevention strategy, much attention has been given to what content should be taught and the effectiveness of that content in achieving desired goals. While some research has problematised how curricular content is understood or taken-up, what remains largely unquestioned is a pedagogical imaginary of knowledge as a fixed and stable object that can be transmitted from teacher to learner. This paper builds on feminist readings of pedagogy, and in particular the work of Elizabeth Ellsworth, to interrogate what might happen within sexuality education by thinking about knowledge as continually being made. Drawing on data from a year-long ethnographic research study conducted with loveLife, a national HIV prevention programme for young people in South Africa, the paper problematises the perceived boundaries of what is taught and explicitly engages the pedagogical approach as a constitutive part of what can/should/must be known as well as what kind of r...

This paper draws on findings from a two-year study of gender and gender transgression among school children and youth in rural Ontario, Canada conducted while running gender equity workshops for students aged 8–18 years, in which I asked participants to document what gender looked and felt like. Through writing prompts, pictures, discussion and theatre, roughly 600 participants had the opportunity to describe gender as well as responses to perceived transgressions of gender. In the course of this work, I became especially interested in the emotions identified by participants as being part of, or experienced through, their gender. In this paper, I focus on notions of happiness, enjoyment and fun, as described by participants in their responses. Happiness is a part of gender that is often overlooked in human rights definitions of gender identity and expression, as well as in the translation of legal discourse into a social justice-oriented curriculum. While participants in this study expressed a wid...

This paper offers insights into how the teaching of queer topics in English language arts classes can be reframed by bridging the goals, practices and conceptual tools of queer theory to literacy teaching. Drawing on an ethnographic classroom study, which explored a 13-week high school Gay and Lesbian Literature course, this paper discusses how teaching an English literature curriculum centred on the voices and stories of LGBTQI people constitutes a meaningful site for learning and teaching. In the process, I show how a queer-themed literature curriculum not only intervenes disruptively into the heteronormative space of school through its content but also through pedagogical practices that open up new lines of thinking for understanding diverse sexualities and genders. Through vignettes from the classroom, I illustrate how queer moments were enacted in this high school course as the class (a) deconstructed literary and media texts; (b) used moments of discomfort for learning; (c) produced counter-narrativ...

Sexuality education in African contexts is riddled with socio-cultural complexity, tension and taboo. Such tensions are compounded when the focus of intervention is primary school children who are presumed ‘innocent’. However, sub-Saharan Africa remains the region of the world most severely impacted upon by the human immunodeficiency virus and the acquired immunodeficiency syndrome, thus heightening the need to talk to children about sex and sexuality. This paper explores the role of consulting pupils, participation and dialogue as methodological innovations that have the potential to enable new ways of thinking about sex and sexuality and the transcendence of ‘dead end debates’ about what should and should not be taught. The paper is based on data from an action research project in Kenya, Ghana and Swaziland. The data show that the desire to create a space characterised by consultation, listening and dialogue in which adults and children could participate ‘as if’ they were social equals was inevitably no...

This paper examines a comprehensive sexuality education programme, Health Education for Youth (HEY), which incorporates anonymous questions about sex and sexuality that participating youth generate into the curriculum. HEY utilises a social ecology framework, decolonising perspectives and feminist methods to inform the programme, its facilitation and the incorporation of participant questions into the curriculum. This paper describes the theoretical and methodological frameworks; curriculum content and use of anonymous questions; programme and participant characteristics; and types and content of questions asked by youth. Findings indicate that young people utilise their agency to ask important sexuality questions and are concerned about similar types and content of questions regardless of programme setting. The benefits of using a social ecology framework, decolonising perspectives and feminist methods to guide curriculum content and session facilitation are discussed along with the value of incorporatin...

Critical Sexuality Studies is an emerging field of academic enquiry linked to an international network of advocacy agencies, activists, and political issues. This paper reports on the development of an advanced short course in sexuality theory and research, drawing on Critical Sexuality Studies and aiming directly at academics in developing countries working in sexuality issues. Over a three-year period, a new curriculum was developed by an international team. The course was piloted in two continents, refined, revised, and released globally under a Creative Commons licence in 2010 on a dedicated website. This paper documents the project and its progress to date.

The aim of this paper is to present and discuss some of the obstacles to effective sexuality education in rural Lesotho schools and offer some suggestions that could facilitate positive change in the current status of sexuality education. The call for education as a ‘vaccine’ against new HIV infections places teachers at the forefront of the fight against the pandemic, and thus it is imperative to understand how they experience teaching about sexuality. Findings in the present study derive from data generated through a research project that sought to explore women teachers' experiences of teaching sexuality education in rural schools in Lesotho. Twelve women teachers' narratives are used to examine the obstacles to effective sexuality education in rural contexts. The study highlights the role of gender dynamics and culture in the effectiveness of school-based sexuality education. The paper argues for a more concerted effort and collaboration between curriculum developers and education stakeholders such th...

At the foundation of most inequalities in expression of sexuality lie social constructions of gender. In this paper, sex education is considered as a possibility to challenge sexism and promote healthy and self-affirmative sex lives. In the past decade, the discourse of sex education in India has become a ‘battle of morality’ where concerned citizens condemn sex education on the grounds it may encourage sexual activity and immoral conduct (e.g. promiscuity or infidelity). The work of non-governmental organisations (NGOs) is an alternative to the governmental national curriculum plan. This paper discusses NGO potential in terms of sexual empowerment by examining beliefs and understanding, choices of information, strategies and methods, and approaches apparent in sex education programmes and projects. Through qualitative data, findings were analysed by constructing a sexual empowerment model that divides components of sex education into four parts and utilises theories of empowerment. The main findings incl...

This paper draws on the theory and method of free association in psychoanalysis to frame an investigation of the content, structure, and function of the thinking expressed in conversations about sexuality and sexual health. The investigation emerges from an ongoing three-year study of the way adolescents, teachers, and peer sex educators negotiate and interpret the language of abstinence and the emotional terrain of sexuality in everyday speech and interaction. Through close readings of a film and related focus group data, the paper calls for attention to free associative movements of thought in sex education conversations. It argues that fostering free association in sex education will make room for the translation of sexuality into thought about the contours of sexuality in experience.

A departmental review of education curricula in Queensland, Australia has found that minimal or no learning about sexuality education takes place. Its public schools and teachers are able to avoid or not fulfil their obligations regarding the teaching of sexuality education and reproductive health to children and young people. This lacuna in schools' duty of care may significantly compromise the well-being, choices, life skills and opportunities for young people as they mature towards adult citizenship, and may even lead to potentially hazardous situations for them. To redress this deficiency, a new curriculum and supporting documents have been developed by Queensland's curriculum authority. This paper audits both the current Human Relationships Education and the new Sexual and Reproductive Health Education curricula. This paper also analyses the rationale for teaching school students about sexuality, relationships and reproduction as an essential part of Health and Physical Education, in light of signifi...

In 2001, the Greek Government introduced sex and gender relationships education as a thematic unit for interdisciplinary Health Education activities. However, the diffusion of such programmes remains extremely limited. The present paper discusses how sex and relationships issues are presented in contemporary Greek primary school textbooks since textbooks play a central role in teaching and learning processes. It has been found that textbook references on a particular topic encourage teachers to select this topic for developing and implementing Health Education projects. In this paper the recent educational reform is presented, as well as the general guidelines for the development of the National Curriculum and Health Education Subject Curriculum, the contents of which determined the guidelines for the development of the new primary textbooks. Within this framework, the article discusses how sex education issues are being represented in primary ‘Environmental Studies’/‘Science’ and ‘Mother Tongue’/‘Literat...

The intention of this paper is two fold. First, it makes explicit a little known and poorly understood area of human experience: transgender. Second, it explores curriculum possibilities opened up by recent legitimating of transgender people through the Gender Recognition Act (2004). The Act foregrounds the necessity for a forum in schools to debate, reflect and understand the full implications of changes to legislation. This paper proposes that, rather than approaching transgender issues through biological science or through the levelling gaze of citizenship, issues of gender identity can be understood without censure through the visual arts. Moreover, the visual arts offer a ‘safe place’ to discuss issues around the body because they allow distance and, in offering visual representations rather than text based work, make visually concrete what science ethically cannot.

Danger and pleasure are terms commonly employed to describe women's sexual experiences, including those of young women. This paper explores how young women's sexual danger and pleasure are represented and characterized in official discourses, specifically those of school‐based sexuality education. Drawing on Michelle Fine's four major discourses of sexuality education, this paper uses the Ontario Curriculum and its companion Course Profiles to analyze school‐based sexuality education in Ontario, Canada. This paper describes how the discourses of victimization and individual morality dominate in the curriculum while the discourse of desire is largely absent. Because there is considerable emphasis on danger/victimization and insufficient attention paid to pleasure/desire, the paper concludes by describing how a discourse of desire might be included in sexuality education curriculum.

Multiple discourses about vaginas exist in various sites in Aotearoa/New Zealand. School policy and texts express one view by discussing vaginas, when they are mentioned, as functional body parts for the purpose of heterosexual intercourse and reproduction. This paper draws attention to the tensions and fissures in a popular secondary school health text, and examines the meanings the text and images may communicate to young people about vaginas. This paper confirms the missing discourses of erotics and desire (Fine, 1992; Burns, 2000; Allen, 2001) in school-based sexuality education, and the heterosexist viewpoint (Hughes, 1996; Quinlivan, 1996) of many school curricula in Aotearoa/New Zealand. Additionally, this paper acknowledges the importance of the educator's role in supplementing limited text, and concludes that there is a strong justification for a more complex discussion of the vagina in school-based sexuality education, including an analysis of multiple representations of the vagina.

Given that educators increasingly have to integrate social and moral education within the general curriculum, this paper considers ways in which the visual arts may or may not be a useful resource for challenging the stereotypical preconceptions about gender and sexual identity held by many people in a post-industrial, intercultural society. Focusing on Tate Britain’s inaugural exhibition for the opening of its new galleries, ‘Exposed: the Victorian Nude’, the paper examines a selection of artefacts that are assumed to represent the sexual mores of Britain at a pivotal time in the construction of its national identity. With reference to the social history of art and feminist theoretical ‘interventions’, the exhibits are analysed as possible evidence of the Victorians’ ‘skills, beliefs and values about sexual relationships, identity and intimacy’ the lifelong study of which provides the Sex Education Forum (1997:1) with a definition of sex education. Subsequently two questions are posed: firstly, what does the exhibition’s selection and hang say about contemporary beliefs? Secondly, can historical artworks be constructively used with young people (post-16) as a catalyst for discussion of sex, gender and sexuality?

Comprehensive sexuality education (CSE) is a key component of efforts to improve sexual and reproductive outcomes for young people. While many governments have established policies and curricula for CSE, there are no quantitative measures of the quality of their implementation in schools. We describe the construction of a school-level index to measure CSE implementation quality using data from Peru, Guatemala, Kenya and Ghana for validation. The composite index represents seven key components of a successful programme: range of topics, values imparted, teaching methods, teacher training, resources available, monitoring and evaluation, and the school environment. These components are combined into two sub-indices (curriculum content and implementation context), which together provide a summary index of implementation quality. We present scores for the seven components, the two sub-indices and the summary index for each country. Ghana scored highest on the summary index, while Guatemala scored lowest, but country rankings varied within the different components. The paper discusses the implications of the findings for improving school-based CSE in these countries. An assessment of the validity and reliability of the index indicates it can be used in other settings and could be a useful tool for educationalists, researchers and programme implementers to measure CSE implementation quality.

Using collective biographical narrative, this paper examines the ways in which school spaces – even in socioculturally and politically conservative locations – might serve to empower trans youth. T...

This paper explores discourses of affirmative consent in sex education curriculum and policy. It traces the ways in which discourses of consent have emerged in sex education debates, focusing first on the activism of two young women in Ontario, Canada who lobbied the provincial government to include discussions of consent in a new Health and Physical Education (HPE) curriculum. Their activism is instructive for the ways in which their lobbying was eventually subsumed into the logics of curriculum, with learning outcomes and lesson plans taming the passion of their protest. As others see in sex education the answer to sexual violence, we cannot forget that sex education is, in part, a defence against passion, and that consent – once swallowed up by HPE – might also work to tame the unruliness of sexuality. Turning to age of consent laws – another arena where discourses of consent discipline the sexuality of young people – I ask how our pedagogical and legal address to sexuality paradoxically refuse...

This paper reports on findings from the first Western Australian Survey of Educators of Sexuality Education, which aimed to assess the state of relationships and sexuality education (RSE) in the state of Western Australia. Key findings show that secondary school teachers provided more hours of RSE instruction than the national average. However, they mainly taught curriculum topics such as Abstinence from Intercourse until Married, Effects of Alcohol/drug Use on Decision-making, Puberty, and Sex and Ethics (respectful relationships). The least taught subjects included Sexually Transmitted Infections (STIs) and HIV/AIDS, Birth Control, the Impact of Media on Sexual Identity and Sexual Orientation. These findings are of concern when one considers that nationally, Western Australia has higher rates of STIs among young people aged 15–24 years and teenage pregnancies, than other parts of the country. Results from the survey can be used to form a baseline measure ahead of the roll-out of the Australian C...

Although social acceptance of gender and sexuality diversity is growing in Australian society, in schools, visibility and inclusion of knowledge pertaining to those who are gender- and/or sexuality-diverse, such as lesbians, gay men and transgender people, remain marginalised. This may be due, in part, to a belief that parents are opposed to such content inclusions in their children’s education; yet, virtually no Australian research supports this belief nor have parental perspectives on gender and sexuality diversity inclusion been specifically examined. This paper draws on a broader research study that examined New South Wales parents’ perceptions about the visibility of gender and sexuality diversity and the inclusion or exclusion of related content in school curriculum. It focuses on one particular focus group comprised of only mothers who lived in a specific enclave of Sydney known for its gender and sexuality diversity. The discussion highlights their awareness of gender and sexuality diversi...

Sexuality education is a compulsory part of The New Zealand Curriculum for state-funded schools. In 2015, the Ministry of Education has published an updated revision of their official guidelines for schools on the teaching of sexuality education. This paper employs Foucauldian discourse analysis to argue that this policy document, Sexuality Education: A Guide for Principals, Boards of Trustees, and Teachers, reflects and reproduces particular ways of knowing which constrain possibilities for socially just sexuality education. These discourses include the adoption of an intellectual approach to teaching sexuality, the mandate to measure learning objectives, and a narrow emphasis on positive sexuality. Intentions for the curriculum to deliver a holistic, socio-ecological vision of sexual health as well as one which embeds Māori values are undermined by dominant understandings of individual action which shape approaches to both sexuality and pedagogy. Furthermore, the liberal recognition of cultural,...

This paper presents findings from a study of students’ writings about the erotic. These occurred in the form of graffiti and were scrawled on toilet doors for female students attending a higher education institution in Malta. The study explores how the erotic was defined and perceived by students, and how they attempted to create alternative spaces to explore their erotic selves through their writing. Foucault’s notion of heterotopia, which refers to spaces enacted for the Other, informs the analysis. Heterotopias subvert the order of spaces and mirror other dominant sites that make up the social fabric. This framework considers the lavatories as heterotopias, through which students broke silences and taboos about the erotic by challenging perspectives concerning sexual relatedness and erotic fantasy. In the absence of sexuality education in the curriculum of the institution in which the study took place, the study suggests that students may have sought out and constructed new ways of learning.

Numerous classroom-based interventions have aimed to improve sexual health outcomes for young people, yet few have shown strong, lasting effects. Ecological approaches that address multiple levels of a young person’s environment offer largely untapped potential to positively change sexual behaviour. This paper presents results of a cluster-randomised trial of a multicomponent sexuality education intervention that integrated a classroom curriculum, parent education workshops and materials, peer advocate programme, and sexual health services at 10 urban high schools. An implementation evaluation, employing quantitative and qualitative instruments, was conducted to examine whether the individual components of the intervention were delivered as planned and how they were received by the target populations. Multilevel modelling was used to evaluate the effect of the multicomponent intervention on outcomes at one-year follow-up. Results showed that the intervention components were successfully implemente...

My reading of the seven papers chosen for inclusion in this special issue of Sex Education reveals several important themes that enhance and challenge our understanding of the multiple ways in whic...

Contains fulltext : 158770.pdf (Publisher’s version ) (Open Access) Today, more than half of the world population is under the age of 25 years and one in four is under age 18. The urgency of expanding access to Comprehensive Sexuality Education (CSE) notably for children and young people in Africa and Asia is greater than ever before. However, many challenges to the implementation and delivery of CSE in resource poor settings have been identified in the literature. CSE's effectiveness could be strongly improved if these challenges were better met. This paper aims to contribute to those much-needed improvements by sharing lessons learned from a decade of implementation of one particular CSE programme, The World Starts With Me, among various populations in 11 low income countries in Africa and Asia. The aims, content, reach and effectiveness of the programme are described. Next, the challenges for implementation and delivery at student, teacher, school and context level are discussed with reference to the wider knowledge base in this area. Finally, suggestions are provided for ways forward including the increased sensitivity of programmes for normative and practical barriers to sexual health, further advancement towards gender transformativity, a far-reaching expansion of comprehensive forms of teacher training and coaching, and a serious stepping-up of multilevel 'whole school' approaches. 16 p.

Recent research shows that young people list media entertainment as one of the sources where they find information about what they really want to know about sex and what is not taught through the school curriculum – namely, relationships and eroticism. This paper addresses the potential role that may be played by small independent alternative feature films such as 52 Tuesdays in the sexual education of young people. While 52 Tuesdays’ purpose was never explicitly pedagogic, the subject matter – family relationships, sexual experimentation, sexual identity and agency, and transgender experience – situates it firmly within the concerns of contemporary young people.

This paper explores notions of (hetero)sexuality circulating in elementary school classrooms through an analysis of students’ own talk and interactions. Data collected during a multi-site ethnography in a diverse set of elementary schools demonstrate that while curricular silences and teachers contribute to heteronormative classroom environments, children also take up and perpetuate heteronormative ideals in their own interactions both through explicitly anti-gay talk and by silencing of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer (LGBTQ)-inclusive perspectives, thereby maintaining the heteronormativity of schools. Findings show (hetero)sexuality to be a constitutive part of classroom life, present even in the formal teaching/instructional time of elementary schools and even in the talk/activities of children themselves. Uninterrupted, these discourses intersect with the official curriculum and reify schools as places in which LGBTQ people/perspectives are not welcome or valued, creating social and acad...

Situated at the intersection between child-led visual methods and sex education, this paper focuses on the potential of youth-led video making to enable young people to develop guiding principles to inform their own sexual behaviour. It draws on findings from a video-making project carried out with a group of South African young people, which engaged them in identifying and tackling critical issues of HIV and AIDS. By analysing one of the youth-generated videos using critical visual analysis, we conclude that youth-led video making can be an effective tool to allow young people to talk about their interests and concerns and to develop guiding principles for their own sexual behaviour. This tool is especially relevant to young people whose needs are not being met by the current sexual health curriculum and can be a fun medium through which to engage participants in ensuring that sex education needs are met.

This paper uses a case study approach to examine how the heteronormative nature of one middle school setting and classroom environment shapes the climate of safety, support and learning for LGBTQ students when they are engaged in studying a novel with a gay character. Heteronormative environments inform and shape positioning of and by students and teacher, impacting how knowledge is created, processed and applied. LGBTQ literature integrated into the classroom curriculum invites opportunities for possibilities through windows and mirrors for exploration of the world and self. Heteronormativity, positioning and LGBTQ literature thereby become interactive catalysts that create and foreclose possibilities and impossibilities for student learning. Three themes emerged from the study that reveal positioning and possibilities when studying a text with a gay character: (1) the school environment and classroom context positioned students as heterosexual; (2) students and teacher positioned gender performance and ...

Young people between the ages of 10 and 19 make up 23% of Pakistan's population. In Pakistan, young people face many challenges in terms of sexual and reproductive health (SRH) issues. These include early marriage and pregnancy, low use of contraception, use of unsafe abortion, lack of relevant information and poor knowledge about bodily development including puberty and menstruation, sexuality, reproduction and HIV. This paper examines the scale-up of a rights-based, life skills-based education programme during the period from 2004 until 2013, which included comprehensive education about SRH issues. The programme was introduced by Rutgers WPF Pakistan in a total of 1188 schools. Introduction and scale-up were made possible by a combination of attributes among the organisations leading the development of the programme and the users. The main challenge, which related to the conservative operating environment in which the programme was first introduced, was addressed through a multiplicity of media and advo...

This paper presents findings from a national study on the beliefs and practices of K-12 educators regarding lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) issues in schools. Over 3400 Canadian educators participated in the study, which took the form of a bilingual (English/French) online survey. Respondents answered questions about their values regarding human rights and LGBTQ-inclusive education, their practices in the classroom, experiences with homophobic and transphobic harassment, and perceptions of support for LGBTQ-inclusive practices. Results indicate that there is a high level of in-principle support for LGBTQ-inclusive education (84.9%); however, actual practice is much lower (61.8%) and there are significant differences in the perspectives and experiences of gay, lesbian, and bisexual identified educators compared with their straight colleagues in terms of curriculum integration and bullying interventions. Findings offer important insights for teacher preparation, curriculum development...

Sexuality education forms part of the national school curricula of most sub-Saharan African countries, yet risk-related sexual behaviour among young people continues to fuel the HIV pandemic in this part of the world. One of the arguments put forward to explain why sexuality education seems to have had little impact on sexual risk-taking is that existing curricula have neglected to take into account the complexity of the social, cultural and gender norms that influence the behaviour of school-going young people in sub-Saharan Africa. Over the past few years, the Department of Basic Education in South Africa has recognised the need to provide guidance to teachers on the content, pedagogical processes and messages that are relevant to their specific context. This paper critically reflects on findings from a literature-based study conducted to identify the cognitive and social factors influencing the behaviour of school-going young people in South Africa and the risk and protective factors that might be part...

Comprehending praxis is a critical step in developing interventions that can have a real-world impact on people's lives. In this paper, we reflect on the lessons learned in the development of a curriculum for young people living in informal settlements in eThekwini, who are exposed to numerous vulnerabilities, including HIV-related risks associated with precarious urban livelihoods. Behavioural interventions have not led to commensurate reductions in HIV incidence, and the impact of these approaches remains regulated by numerous contextual conditions affecting those participating. Our collaborative project tested the impact of implementing a combination of the well-tested gender transformation intervention, Stepping Stones, with a new livelihood transformation curriculum, Creating Futures, among young people in eThekwini's informal settlements. Creating Futures was grounded in the theory and practice of sustainable livelihoods, but equally in the experience of the multi-disciplinary project team members w...

A Family Life Education (FLE) curriculum was introduced in Fiji schools in 2010 in response to concern about increasing teenage pregnancies and young people's vulnerability to sexually transmitted infections and other health and social problems. However, conservative and suspicious parental attitudes towards FLE have been an obstacle. The need for an educational programme for parents to complement the FLE curriculum taught in schools is now urgent. This study examines parents' views on the sex and sexuality component of the FLE curriculum. Data were collected from 474 individuals using questionnaires, focus groups and face-to-face interviews. Participants represented different ethnic groups with Indigenous Fijians, women and Christians in the majority. The influence of the Christian religion on negative attitudes towards homosexuality and the use of protection is strong, as is parents' resistance to discussing sex education with their children. The paper concludes with suggestions on how to counter parent...

Research with lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgendered, queer, questioning (LGBTQ) and genderqueer (GQ) students has highlighted the links between school-based marginalisation and decreased school outcomes. This paper applies stage–environment fit theory to an investigation of school ‘gender climate’, the official and unofficial policing of gender expression by school staff and students, to explore what role gender climate plays in the above relationship. Three school life components associated with stage–environment fit theory – (1) the organisational, (2) the instructional and (3) the interpersonal – were used to scaffold interview data on school gender climate from five LGBTQ Australian young people. Results implicate school staff in the maintenance of gender climate and highlight the deleterious impact of school silences on related subject matter.

This paper presents findings from focus group interviews conducted in Swedish government group homes for young people with a history of psychosocial problems, substance misuse and criminal behaviour. Participants were asked to reflect on a newly developed sex education curriculum located within a harm-reduction paradigm prior to its implementation. In addition to appreciating the proposed 10 sessions, young people positively evaluated the proposed dialogical and norm critical teaching style as likely to facilitate productive discussion about sexuality. Findings will contribute to future implementation of the sex education curriculum across a range of institutional settings. Results also highlight the democratic aspects of involving vulnerable young people in matters that directly concern them, and underline the importance of properly contextualised forms of sex education.

Comprehensive sexuality education (CSE) has been recognised globally as key to helping young people assert their sexual and reproductive rights. In India too, there is growing awareness of the importance of providing CSE not only to reduce sexually transmitted infections, unintended pregnancies and abortions but also to teach important life skills. Simultaneously, lack of political will and conflicting interests among certain religious and political factions have ensured that no uniform CSE curriculum has been implemented throughout the country. This paper analyses the Adolescent Education Programme teacher curriculum as revised in 2009–2010 by the National Council of Educational Research and Training and the United Nations Population Fund. It highlights some of the opportunities presented by the curriculum and argues that despite its intent of providing relevant sexuality education for young people, the language of the curriculum is vague, thus potentially exacerbating confusion, and excluding people who...

In Indonesian primary schools, sex education is implicitly integrated into various related subjects, such as science, biology, social studies and religion. The technical facts of ovulation and sperm are mentioned in biology, although little or no connection is made between this process and sexual intercourse. By the end of primary school, therefore, children are likely to have a poor understanding of how pregnancy can occur. Given that young girls at this age have already experienced or will soon experience menarche, and given the increasing trend towards delaying the age at marriage in Indonesian society, this lack of knowledge places young people at risk of various negative consequences, including unwanted pregnancy. In this paper, we investigate the level of understanding regarding human reproduction amongst 1762 students attending the last year of primary school, distributed across 32 different schools in Indonesia. Despite the fact that all schools follow a national curriculum, our results reveal wid...

As discourse in sexual education classes across the USA in 1996 began to change, media outlets became important sources of education for teenage girls. Unaffected directly by government policy, one of the most popular teenage girls' magazines, Seventeen, provided a plethora of information on sex. Several scholars have examined teenage magazines' sexual discourse, yet few have assessed the accuracy of sexual health information during a time period when the US Federal Government instituted an abstinence-only curriculum policy for public schools. In addition, there is a gap in the literature regarding magazines' attitudes about teenage abstinence, or lack thereof, especially in a time when politics had taken a very conservative stance on the issue. This paper examines Seventeen magazine between 1996 and 1998 to explore the magazine's attitude towards teen sex and abstinence and to analyse the accuracy of sexual health messages surrounding topics such as abortion, contraception and STDs.

This paper describes the process involved in creating a community-based training curriculum designed to build capacity and foster new knowledge in support of HIV/AIDS education. Highlighted are the challenges and triumphs incurred while working with community and academic partners to ensure the production of an adaptable curriculum designed to accommodate diverse teaching and learning styles. The curriculum provides teachers, community leaders and peer educators with knowledge and skills to competently deliver HIV/AIDS information, regardless of previous training in sexual health education. Educators are encouraged to adapt the curriculum according to community/classroom needs. Also highlighted is the need for creating further opportunities that enable teachers, community practitioners and researchers to collaborate around issues that influence learners' lives.

Liberal common sense sees the absence of conversations about abortion in schools as the consequence of a taboo that leaves teenage girls uninformed and silenced. From this perspective, the solution is to systematically introduce the subject of abortion in sex education curricula in order to provide information, resources and discussion on the schools' terms. Using post-structuralist theory, I argue that what might be needed instead is a certain ‘side-spreading’, rather than an official understanding, of the subject of abortion in schools. I aim to de-naturalise dominant liberal discourse by making transparent the links between sex education and ‘populational reasoning’, considering powers of production, questioning the position of schools as official holders and spreaders of approved knowledge about sex, and inviting possibilities to ‘de-territorialise’ and ‘re-territorialise’ the subject of abortion in unpredictable ways. This paper is composed of personal reflections, poems and theoretical explorations ...

Policy-makers making decisions on the implementation of school-based sexuality education (SE) programmes face two important questions: (1) what are the costs of implementing and scaling up SE programmes, and (2) what are the impacts? This paper responds to these questions by retrospectively assessing costs, impact and cost-effectiveness of the national school-based SE programme in Estonia 1997–2009. The three-year curriculum had been taught to 190,000 students at the end of 2009. The cost of reaching one student was USD 32.90 and the total costs were USD 5.6 million. There has been a remarkable improvement in sexual health indicators in the age groups 15–19 and 20–24 years in Estonia between 2001 and 2009. During this period, annual abortions, STIs and diagnosed HIV infections in the age groups were reduced by 37%, 55% and 89%, respectively. It is difficult to assess to what extent the improvements in these sexual health indicators are attributable to the SE programme. Nevertheless, our conservative thres...

Since Michelle Fine's writing on the missing discourse of desire in sex education, there has been considerable prompting among sexuality educators and feminist scholars to incorporate talk of pleasure into sex education curricula. While the calls for inclusion continue, few have actually examined the curricula for a pleasure discourse or explored how it is contextualised within sex education curricula. In this paper, we analysed curricula used in the USA in the past decade. A qualitative thematic analysis revealed that the discourse around pleasurable sex was often linked to a range of dangerous or negative outcomes including not using condoms, rushing into sex without thinking, regretted sex, and pregnancy or STDs. When the discourse around pleasure was included in sections on ‘knowing one's body’, this discourse took a medicalised, scientific tone. Pleasurable sex was also presented in more positive ways, either linked to marriage in Abstinence Only Until Marriage curricula, or within a more feminist di...

In 2007, six countries (Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Paraguay, Peru and Uruguay) commenced work on a project to harmonise public policy on school sexuality education (SE) and the prevention of HIV. Inter-sectoral management committees for SE involving ministries of education, ministries of health and civil society were established, national policies and work plans were formulated and implemented, and SE/HIV prevention activities were carried out. The strengths and weaknesses of implementation were assessed. After this, the beginnings of a community of practice were created, with national focal points. This paper analyses the above process using qualitative data generated through semi-structured questionnaires and interviews, with a focus on the perceived contribution of regional collaboration to the development of national policies, national curricula and implementation. Overall, the initiative reached 83,000 teachers and 1,500,000 pupils. Training materials and national curricula and policies were developed...

Sexuality education and preventive sexual abuse education emerged from different historical moments and social movements. Consequently, they are often taught as separate subjects in secondary schools. This paper seeks to highlight how this separation denies space for young people to grapple with the concept of consent, the art of negotiation, the interrelatedness and acknowledgement of pleasure, danger and ambivalence within sexually intimate relations and the complexities of sexualities. Importantly, this separation also negates possibilities for education to embrace a discourse of ethical erotics that includes space for the exploration of desire and pleasure; for it is not possible to discuss ethical erotics when one is not allowed to discuss ethics and erotics within the same conversation. To highlight this argument, we analyse the Health and Physical Education Curriculum in Aotearoa New Zealand which states that programmes for the prevention of sexual abuse should not be taught concurrently or consecu...

This paper offers an overview of the current state, difficulties, limitations and future possibilities for sex education in Spain. On the basis of a study involving 3760 teachers from all provinces in Spain, a detailed analysis of the obstacles at legislative, school and teacher levels was developed. Significant weaknesses were found at each of these levels. The main obstacles were the fact that sex education is a cross-curricular subject and contains content that should be incorporated throughout the curriculum rather than in one specific course; lack of monitoring of the practice of sex education; lack of interest in the topic in many schools; and finally lack of appropriate teacher training. A variety of different actions at legislative, school and teacher levels are proposed to overcome those difficulties.

In this paper, it is argued that sexuality education for individuals with intellectual disabilities has historically been incomplete to non-existent. While some progress has been made in this area, individuals with intellectual disabilities continue to receive inadequate sexuality education due to its failure to address the ‘ignored curriculum’. The ignored curriculum is defined as the curriculum learned incidentally outside the classroom through peer interactions – interactions from which students with intellectual disabilities are often precluded. Here, comprehensive sexuality education that addresses the ignored curriculum is linked to a person's ability to exercise full rights of citizenship. An argument is made for a critical pedagogical approach to sexuality education as an effective means to teach individuals with intellectual disabilities the ignored curriculum of sexuality.

Sex education is a contested site in the school curriculum as communities grapple with who should teach young people about sex and how it should be taught. In this paper we ask whether same‐sex‐attracted young people are being exposed to appropriate and relevant sex education at school, and if they are not whether it is necessary that sex education be inclusive of sexual difference. In the second Australian survey of 1749 same‐sex‐attracted youth of 14–21 years old, we ask young people about sex education classes at school, how useful they were for them, their sources of information regarding gay and lesbian relationships and safe sex, sexual behaviours and incidence of sexually transmissible infections and pregnancy. We find from the data that most of these young people found sex education to be useless because it was not inclusive. In comparison with normative studies, these young people were, on average, sexually active earlier, had higher rates of diagnosed sexually transmissible infections and at lea...

Previous research has documented a need for the development of a sex education programme in Turkish schools in terms of adolescence readiness and the presence of misconceptions regarding critical aspects of sexual issues. Currently no school‐based sex education is available for Turkish adolescents. This paper presents the development of a contemporary sex education programme for 12‐year‐old to 14‐year‐old adolescents, entitled ‘The Human Development Program for 12–14 Year Old Adolescents’. A five‐step programme development model was used including reviewing internationally recognised sex education programmes for this age group. Sexuality Information and Education Council of United States guidelines were chosen as an educational framework, and Turkish cultural values were integrated into the curriculum. The sex curriculum consists of an eight‐session interactive programme in which parental permission and involvement is required. Five units are presented: human development, relationships, sexual behaviour, ...