Considerations for Sexuality Education and Services for LGB Elders

Sexuality education and health services for elderly individuals who reside in care settings (e.g., assisted living facilities, nursing homes, retirement communities) have received limited attention in the professional literature. However, the lack of sexual health promotion practices in elder care facilities can be detrimental to older adults’ overall health and quality of life. Barriers to sexuality education services for lesbian, gay, and bisexual (LGB) elders are explored and include history of LGB equality in the United States and lack of social support, as well as discrimination among formal care facilities and health care professionals. The Community Readiness Model (CRM) is proposed for addressing these barriers. The purpose of the CRM is to assess readiness characteristics of a community before program implementation and then build capacity with programming in that community for support and education. Sexuality educators currently have the opportunity to develop and implement sexual health education and promotion resources that can potentially improve the quality of life for LGB individuals transitioning into the latter stages of the life course.     

Navigating Sexualization as a Sexuality Professional: Recommendations from Sexuality Educators at the 2016 National Sex Ed Conference

Sexuality professionals are likely to experience unwanted sexualization based solely on their profession. Sexuality professionals are sexualized by various groups of people including strangers, colleagues, or even friends and family. The research literature discusses how sexuality researchers experience and navigate this sexualization but includes little information about the ways in which sexuality educators are sexualized. At the 2016 National Sex Ed Conference, we facilitated a workshop for sex educators to discuss how they are sexualized and how they would suggest navigating such experiences. Through this workshop proceeding, we examine how educators echoed many of the same strategies used by sexuality researchers found in the literature along with some unique population concerns and strategies.     

Queering Constructs: Proposing a Dynamic Gender and Sexuality Model

Abstract

Higher education educators commonly understand social identities, including gender, to be fluid and dynamic. Lev's (2004) model of four components of sexual identity is commonly used to demonstrate the fluidity of sex, gender, and sexuality for individuals, but it does little to address the fixedness of those constructs. Through a multipronged intersectional framework and by centering trans* -students, this article proposes a more dynamic model for gender and sexuality.     

Parental Attitudes Regarding School-Based Sexuality Education in Utah

Sexuality education programs can be broadly categorized as either risk-avoidance or risk-reduction approaches. Health educators in Utah public schools must teach a state mandated risk-avoidance curriculum which prohibits the advocacy or encouragement of contraception. Multiple national surveys indicate that parents prefer a risk-reduction approach to sexuality education that promotes abstinence and the use of condoms or contraception for prevention of unwanted pregnancy and sexually transmitted infection. To date, no survey of Utah parents has been conducted.

This study utilized an Internet survey to gather data from 344 Utah parents to analyze their preferences regarding school-based sexuality education, sexuality topics, and support for objectives from the National Sexuality Education Standards. The vast majority of Utah parents surveyed support a risk-reduction approach to sexuality education, a wide variety of sexuality topics, and the majority of National Sexuality Education Standards. Statistically significant differences were identified by parents’ education, income, attendance at religious services, and political affiliation. Results support that Utah laws and education policies should be reexamined to provide for instruction that aligns with professional recommendations, best-practice recommendations based on peer-reviewed research, parental attitudes, and the needs of Utah teens.     

Striving for empathy: affinities,alliances and peer sexuality educators

Peer sexuality educators' accounts of their work reveal two approaches to empathy with their students: affinity and alliance. ‘Affinity-based empathy’ rests on the idea that the more commonalities sexuality educators and students share (or perceive they share), the more they will be able to empathise with one another, while ‘alliance-based empathy’ is an analytical process of considering the social contexts that shape others' lives. We assess the potential for each source of empathy to equip peer sexuality educators to counter hierarchical models of teaching and learning, effect social change and promote the interests of youth. Because shared identity categories prove difficult to manage and sustain, we find affinity alone does not offer peer sexuality educators lasting opportunities to work with young people. In contrast, developing alliance-based empathy prepares peer educators – indeed, all sexuality educators – to identify inequalities or barriers that others face and seek ways to foster social change. We conclude with recommendations for future research.     

欧洲性教育标准述评

随着欧洲各国对性教育重要性认识的提高,加之欧洲各国性教育发展水平不一致,性教育标准多样,无统一的标准,不利于各国相互借鉴以改善性教育。鉴于此,世界卫生组织欧洲区域办事处和联邦健康教育中心于2010年联合制定了欧洲性教育标准。该标准从信息、技能、态度三个方面对6个年龄段的性教育制定具体的内容。该标准首次引入全面性教育(holistic sexuality education),重新定义了性教育年龄段,丰富了性教育的内容,并强调各个年龄段前后衔接。欧洲性教育标准值得借鉴,中国今后在性教育方面应摒弃传统性教育观念、倡导"全面性教育",注重学校性教育内容的广泛性与实用性,以一种积极、整体的方式讲授关于性健康和预防性侵犯的知识,并注重培养高尚的性道德,树立正确的性价值观。     

Transgender young people’s narratives of intimacy and sexual health: implications for sexuality education

Abstract

Sexuality education as pedagogy is often fraught by the perceived requirement to balance the informational needs of young people with an investment in notions of childhood ‘innocence’. Nowhere is this perhaps more evident than in sexuality education that seeks to be inclusive of transgender young people, often resulting in the failure of such education to address the needs of such students. In an attempt at addressing the relative dearth of information about what transgender young people would like to see covered in sexuality education, in this paper we explore transgender young people’s accounts of intimacy and sexual health and consider what this means for school-based sexuality education. To do this, we analyse discussions of intimacy from the perspectives of transgender young people as narrated in a sample of YouTube videos. We conclude by advocating for an approach to sexuality education that largely eschews the gendering of body parts and gametes, and which instead focuses on function, so as to not only address the needs of transgender young people (who may find normative discussions of genitals distressing), but to also provide cisgender young people with a more inclusive understanding of their own and other people’s bodies and desires.     

Feminine sexual desire and shame in the classroom: an educator’s constructions of and investments in sexuality education

ABSTRACT

Within the growing body of literature on sexuality education in South Africa, researchers have highlighted how teachers may face, or themselves be, barriers to the implementation of rights-based comprehensive sexuality education. Important issues with regard to educators are: firstly, the social and discursive space within which educators are located; and secondly, the complex emotional and psychic investments that educators take up within particular discourses and practices. This paper explores, through a psychosocial reading of an interview extract with a particular educator based in the Eastern Cape of South Africa, how discursive and psychic concerns are sutured within the complex subjectivity of the educator as the medium for sexual education in schools. Specifically, it highlights the numerous ways in which feminine sexuality and desire may be avoided, denied and silenced. Even when feminine desire is specifically evoked as in this case, it is done so in a way that ensures social and cultural respectability, thereby reproducing shame narratives that form and maintain traditional gender discourses. Our analysis demonstrates how engaging with educators as subjects with their own sexual history and psychic dynamics, and as individuals with raced, gendered and classed identities, is a potentially transformative perspective for effective sexuality education.     

Exploring discursive barriers to sexual health and social justice in the New Zealand sexuality education curriculum

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, ethnic, sexual and gender diversity in the curriculum unintentionally reinscribes an unmarked white, secular, heterosexuality as the norm. This paper reflexively critiques the discursive tensions that inhibit the realisation of sexuality education in schools which meets the needs of diverse students and offers it as a possible site for social justice.     

Perspectives on Conceptualizing Developmentally Appropriate Sexuality Education

Despite recognition of the importance of a developmentally appropriate approach to sexuality education, there is little direct guidance on how to do this. This study employed in-depth interviews with experienced sexuality educators and developers of sexuality education materials to identify how this concept is understood and applied in the field. Developmentally appropriate sexuality education was conceptualized consistently across interviews to include (a) addressing developmentally relevant topics, (b) adapting content to cognitive development, (c) accommodating developmental diversity, and (d) facilitating the internalization of sexual health messages. However, these views fell short of incorporating the breadth of knowledge offered by adolescent development research.     

Politicising action research through queer theory

Queer theory and action research together offer possibilities for exposing the deep injustice of both homophobia and heterosexism. Underpinning identity categories of sexuality and gender, these forms of social injustice lurk in schools, families, religions, communities, and nation‐states. For educators and educational researchers, addressing homophobia and heterosexism in schools and other educational institutions may be enabled through action research that takes up the premises of queer theory. The inquiry part of queer theory and research is interested in how gender, sex, desire, and sexuality organise all human behaviour. Action research can materialise the radical potential of queer theory through research projects that provide opportunities for homophobic and heterosexist teachers, students, administrators, counsellors, parents, and even researchers towards asking questions about how they identify self and other and how this in turn is implicated in a social hierarchy that devalues those whose sexual practices are different from the norm.     

School-based primary school sexuality education for migrant children in Beijing,China

In May 2007, Beijing Normal University launched a programme of school-based sexuality education for migrant children in Xingzhi Primary School in Beijing. Over the past seven years, the project team has developed a school-based sexuality education curriculum using the International Technical Guidance on Sexuality Education published by UNESCO. The team has developed 12 volumes of textbooks for grades 1–6; trained teachers to deliver sexuality education using participatory teaching methods; and involved parents in the sexuality education process. The first group of migrant students to receive the full 6 years of sexuality education graduated in June 2013. Sexuality education in schools is gaining increasing attention and help from many sectors of Chinese society.     

Sexuality education: how children of lesbian mothers ‘learn’ about sex/uality

Sexuality is something that children experience from an early age. It may be a cause of individual concern and anxiety, but is seldom, if ever, deconstructed at any stage of a child's education. Institutionalized fear and misunderstandings of Section 28 (1988) have effectively removed discussion of sexuality, homosexual or otherwise, from the English school curriculum. This structural silence on sexuality is all too frequently repeated at home. In this article I interrogate how children from lesbian parent households ‘learn’ about sexuality, looking at the effects of their parents' (homo)sexual orientation on their ‘sexuality education’. I consider how sex education is taught in schools; what children traditionally ‘learn’ about sexuality. I then look at whether sexuality education is any different for children from lesbian parent families; whether these children have greater sexuality knowledge, and, if so, how this has been ‘learnt’. I suggest that it may be the ambient presence of sexuality—as both a topic of conversation and mothers' unspoken sexual identity—that means lesbian parent families offer a distinctive form of sexuality education. This article draws on empirical research on sexuality and lesbian parent families with lesbian parent families who lived in the Yorkshire region, UK.     

Is Texting Ruining Intimacy? Exploring Perceptions Among Sexuality Students in Higher Education

In the context of researchers’ and educators’ concerns about the pervasive use of technology to communicate with one another, this study explored whether the frequency of emerging adults’ computer-mediated communication (CMC) is correlated with their perceptions of intimacy, relationship, and sexual satisfaction. The sample included 298 young adults ages 18–29, primarily female students in human sexuality courses, who had been in a face-to-face romantic relationship for at least six weeks and who used CMC to communicate with their romantic partner. Examining the frequency of CMC, intimacy, and relationship satisfaction, the only significant correlation was with participants who sent a moderate number of emails to their partners in a typical day. There were no significant correlations between sexual satisfaction and frequency of any form of CMC (texting, instant messaging, or email). The findings of this research suggest that the use of CMC among this sample is not problematic. For some, in fact, CMC may be considered a helpful tool for maintaining their relationship.     

The State of Sexual Health Education in U.S. Medicine

Although studies have shown that patients want to receive sexual health services from their physicians, doctors often lack the knowledge and skills to discuss sexual health with their patients. There is little consistency among medical schools and residency programs in the United States regarding comprehensiveness of education on sexual health. Sexuality education in U.S. medical schools and residency programs is reviewed, highlighting schools that go beyond the national requirements for sexuality education. Increasing the amount of sexuality instruction provided for medical education and training, standardizing sexuality education requirements in medical school and residency programs, incorporating different learning models, establishing means of consistently assessing and evaluating sexuality knowledge and skills, and creating national certification standards for the practice of sexual medicine are recommended.     

The Components of Great Sex

Ubiquitous “sex tips” in popular media evidence an unquenchable public interest in learning how to experience “great sex,” and studies confirm that a great sexual relationship correlates to general relationship satisfaction, which in turn correlates to overall happiness. While studies of great sex or “optimal sexuality” are few, enough is known to conclude that the paths to great sex depicted in popular media are largely dead ends. This lesson plan will help educators (a) dispel inaccurate information about optimal sexuality disseminated in the popular media and (b) inform students about the components of optimal sexuality.     

Navigating a bumpy road. Developing sexuality education that supports young people’s sexual agency

The complexity of young people’s strategic negotiation of sexual agency constitutes a challenge for professionals working in the area of sexuality education. This paper explores how comprehensive sexuality education can support young people to develop sexual agency in all its forms: embodied, bonded, narrative and moral. A first step is to base sexuality education on the recognition of the connectedness of young people to different people and to different sexual cultures. This implies that comprehensive sexuality education should provide the tools that can help young people in the process of taking up a position, forming an identity and embodying a sexual self within their own social and cultural context. Moreover, comprehensive sexuality education should not only be aimed at empowering individuals, but should also address different sexual cultures, gender norms and other social norms, to stimulate critical consciousness and collective agency, and thereby create an environment that enables and supports young people’s agency and diminishes inequality and restrictive norms.     

Comprehensive Sexuality Education for Adolescents in Zambia via the Mobile-Optimized Website TuneMe: A Content Analysis

Abstract

Adolescents in sub-Saharan Africa encounter high risks associated with sexuality and reproduction, yet face numerous barriers in obtaining appropriate health services and information. Mobile phones provide a unique opportunity to provide youth with this critical sexual and reproductive health information need. Designed from the United Nations Comprehensive Sexuality Education framework, the mobile-optimized app TuneMe aims to provide adolescents living in eight sub-Saharan African countries—Zambia, Malawi, Zimbabwe, Swaziland, Lesotho, South Africa, Botswana, and Namibia—with sexual and reproductive health information, and to promote uptake and use of sexual and reproductive health services. To assess the scope and appropriateness of TuneMe’s sexuality education content, we conducted a directed content analysis of the 299 articles published on the Zambia-specific TuneMe site between October 2015 and June 2017. Results from this analysis indicate that the greatest information provided by TuneMe was on sexual and reproductive health and HIV, followed by relationships, sexual rights, and citizenship. There was substantially less information that focused specifically on matters of pleasure, violence, diversity, and gender. Content was situated within relatable and culturally-relevant contexts, but gave mixed, and often problematic, depictions of gender norms. This assessment is central to understanding current and future mobile-based sexuality education programming.     

Sex and Breastfeeding: An Educational Perspective

Expectant and new parents have many concerns regarding the relationship between sexuality and breastfeeding. How is a new mother''s libido affected by breastfeeding? Why do some women get sexually excited when breastfeeding? Is this frequent or normal? How does the partner feel about breasts full of milk? Why do breasts leak during a woman''s orgasm? Perinatal educators are in a privileged position to reassure these parents about this relationship while promoting the breastfeeding bond between the mother and child and the intimacy bond between the parents.