Sex Education
Sex education refers to the process of providing information and guidance on human sexuality, including reproductive health, sexual anatomy, and sexual activity. It aims to promote healthy attitudes and behaviors related to sex and relationships, as well as to prevent negative outcomes such as unintended pregnancies and sexually transmitted infections. Sex education can be delivered through formal school programs, community initiatives, and parental guidance.
8 Key excerpts on "Sex Education"
eBook - ePubDiversity in Unity: Perspectives from Psychology and Behavioral Sciences
Proceedings of the Asia-Pacific Research in Social Sciences and Humanities, Depok, Indonesia, November 7-9, 2016: Topics in Psychology and Behavioral Sciences
- Amarina Ashar Ariyanto, Hamdi Muluk, Peter Newcombe, Fred Piercy, Elizabeth Kristi Poerwandari, Sri Hartati Suradijono, Amarina Ashar Ariyanto, Hamdi Muluk, Peter Newcombe, Fred P Piercy, Elizabeth Kristi Poerwandari, Sri Hartati R. Suradijono(Authors)
- 2017(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...This understanding is achieved within the framework of promoting the value of health and socio cultural value of the body, along with the effort towards raising child awareness about sexual harassment (UNFPA, 2015). Four components are ideally included in Sex Education service. These are as follows (UNESCO, 2009): 1. Knowledge: Sex Education should provide accurate information about human sexuality. 2. Values, attitudes, and social norms: Sex Education should facilitate students to explore values, attitudes, and social norms that are applied regarding sexual behaviour, including mutual respect, human rights, tolerance, and gender equality. 3. Interpersonal skills: Sex Education should encourage acquisition of decision making, assertiveness, negotiation, and refusal skills in relation to the process of forming and maintaining relationships with others, such as family members, friends, and spouse. 4. Responsibility: Sex Education should encourage students to take responsibility for their behaviour. Responsibility can be defined in terms of caring for themselves and avoiding sexual harassment. Furthermore, UNFPA (2012) provides an overview of the topics to be discussed in Sex Education, which is as follows: 1. Awareness of self and personal relationship with others 2. Human development, including puberty, bodily functions, and reproduction 3. Sexual behaviour 4. Sexual health, including pregnancy, prevention of sexually transmitted diseases, contraception, and abortion 5. Communication skills, negotiation, and decision making In accordance with UNFPA, Berman (2009) also stated that these five topics are the main topics of Sex Education. In addition, the sequence of topic delivery starts with a discussion about the human body, its anatomy, and the concept of puberty...
eBook - ePubEvidence-based Approaches to Sexuality Education
A Global Perspective
- James J. Ponzetti, Jr., James J. Ponzetti, Jr.(Authors)
- 2015(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...Contemporary sexuality education is offered in many ways, using a range of approaches, forms, pedagogies, and resources, that are not always in concurrence. Definition of Sexuality Education Sexuality education (hereinafter referred to as SE) is subject to various social trends, public health concerns, cultural norms, and sundry controversies at different times and in incongruous ways. Scant attention has been given to sexuality as a positive experience through nonexploitative sexual exploration. Instead, concerns such as controlling reproduction, preventing sexually transmitted infections, or treating sexual dysfunction are typically emphasized (Wampold, 2014). Diverse approaches to SE have generated several descriptors for this litigious area of education. The primary descriptor, “Sex Education,” is actually the most restrictive. Learning objectives and curricula development offered the definition of the subject matter. Accordingly, Sex Education focuses attention on the biological characteristics that define humans as female or male. While these characteristics are not mutually exclusive, it is naïve to make use of only biological markers and create a dichotomy between men and women. Further, many languages restrict the term sex in common parlance to mean genital activity. Given such limited conceptions, the scope of Sex Education is reduced to instruction on subjects such as sexual anatomy, reproduction, birth control, and disease prevention. A second descriptor, “sex and relationship education” (or SRE), is commonly used in the U.K. It extends Sex Education by contextualizing the subject matter within sexual relationships and interaction (Aggleton & Crewe, 2005; Kane, 2008; Turnbull, van Schaik, & van Wersch, 2010). So, SRE includes information on such topics as body image, sexual orientation, decision-making, sexual communication, and personal values. Yet, SRE has been a contentious subject wrapped up in turbulent and wide-ranging debates in the U.K...
eBook - ePubSexuality in Adolescence
The digital generation
- Meredith Temple-Smith, Susan Moore, Doreen Rosenthal(Authors)
- 2015(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...Finally, characteristics to enable successful implementation of Sex Education are outlined, including engagement with appropriate authorities, and training, monitoring, supervision and support of teaching staff. This study highlights the many shortcomings of current research into sexuality education, and points to the need for further work to determine which educational strategies and activities are most effective at changing behavioural factors both across and within cultures. Research into sexual health programmes for young people has shown that many evaluations are too complex, underfunded and rushed, which compromises recognition of the nuances of programmes. In addition, often evaluations are conducted over too short a timeframe to examine long-term change (Newton et al., 2012). Religion We turn now to a broader aspect of the social context, namely religion. Most religions emphasize or even ordain sexual values that encourage conservatism and restraint, such as premarital chastity and marital fidelity. Some proscribe contraception, homosexuality and abortion. Today’s powerful pressures towards adolescent sexual activity militate against their continued involvement in traditional religion, a situation that can leave young people in a spiritual vacuum in terms of developing values about sex and relationships. Values adopted by the popular media and the adolescent subculture may well fill this vacuum and, as we have seen, Sex Education can play a powerful role in providing positive, value-based learning. If religiosity is an important part of an adolescent’s identity, negative views of sexuality from within their faith can have a profound impact on their own developing sexuality and for those whose sexuality falls outside traditional heterosexuality, this can be extremely challenging (Harris, 2009; Ward, 2005). Religiosity, not religion There is now considerable research indicating that it is not religion per se that directly influences sexual behaviour...
eBook - ePubGlobal Perspectives and Key Debates in Sex and Relationships Education
Addressing Issues of Gender, Sexuality, Plurality and Power
- V. Sundaram, H. Sauntson, V. Sundaram, H. Sauntson(Authors)
- 2016(Publication Date)
- Palgrave Pivot(Publisher)
...1 School-Based Sex and Relationships Education: Current Knowledge and Emerging Themes Felicity Thomas and Peter Aggleton Sundaram, Vanita and Helen Sauntson, eds. Global Perspectives and Key Debates in Sex and Relationships Education: Addressing Issues of Gender, Sexuality, Plurality and Power. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. DOI : 10.1057/9781137500229.0006. Introduction It is widely accepted that children and young people have the right to education for sexual health, with these rights being enshrined in the UN Convention of the Rights of the Child (UNCRC). 1 According to WHO (2010), knowledge and information provided through sexual health education is essential if people are to access their sexual rights and be sexually healthy. Education for sexual health – called variously Sex Education, sexuality education or sex and relationships education (hereafter, SRE) – involves the acquisition of information and the opportunity for young people to explore and develop their attitudes, beliefs and values as they relate to gender and sexuality, sexual and gender identity, relationships and intimacy. Sexual health education also aims to develop young people’s knowledge and skills to make informed choices regarding their behaviour, and in so doing, limit their risk and vulnerability to sexual ill-health through factors such as unwanted pregnancy, unwanted, abusive and exploitative sexual activity, unsafe abortion and STIs, including HIV. Sexual health programmes can be delivered in a range of contexts including schools or workplaces or in the community. This chapter examines what is known globally about effective approaches to SRE in schools...
eBook - ePubTeaching Gender?
Sex Education and Sexual Stereotypes
- Tricia Szirom(Author)
- 2017(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...7 The development and provision of Sex Education The efforts of children and adolescents to gain information about themselves and their sexuality are generally foiled by the ignorance and embarrassment first, of their parents, and then of their teachers-an attitude which they quickly realise is a reflection of society as a whole … Young people themselves learn to be embarrassed, to regard certain topics as ‘taboo’ and to fall prey to garbled and often terrifying legends. (Royal Commission on Human Relationships, Vol. 2, 1977:33) It should be evident that sex educators are in league with sexologists, who represent every shade of muddy gray morality, ministers coloured atheistic pink, and camp followers of every persuasion-off beat psychiatrists to ruthless publishers of pornography. (Drake, 1972:193) The debate over the introduction of education about sex and sexuality into the school curriculum is not new and it is certainly not confined to Australia. The current efforts to include Sex Education in the school curriculum are preceded by a long history of attempts which have only sometimes been successful, as for example in Sweden. At other times, those groups which oppose the introduction of Sex Education succeed in having it kept out of, or removed from, the curriculum. In order to understand the development of the debate it is necessary to trace the introduction of Sex Education through such strands as health education, human relations education, personal development programmes and the influence of community groups such as the Family Life Movement and Family Planning Association. In the nineteenth century, the popular method of dealing with childhood sexuality was to deny the existence of sex. Late· in that century, there emerged an awareness of the need for ‘hygiene’ education and a number of books were published seriously urging young people to lead virtuous lives...
- Daniel Thomas Cook(Author)
- 2020(Publication Date)
- SAGE Publications Ltd(Publisher)
...Thus, sexualities education may focus on sexual conduct issues such as active decision making, relationships, and safer sex practices whilst also addressing broader social issues such as age of consent, coercion and sexual violence, sexually transmitted infections, and young people’s social inclusion and participation as citizens. Since the 1970s, mainstream Western sexualities education has been underpinned by a humanist perspective, founded upon the rights of citizens to a full, happy, and healthy sex life—as one element of general mental and physical well-being. The ascendancy of this humanist approach has been linked to a broader liberalisation of attitudes and laws on sexual conduct in Western countries during this period and the secularisation of societies previously underpinned by religious codes of morality...
eBook - ePubYoung People's Views on Sex Education
Education, Attitudes and Behaviour
- Dr Lynda Measor, Lynda Measor, Katrina Miller, Coralie Tiffin(Authors)
- 2012(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...It shows that boys responded much more negatively than girls. We know from quantitative research projects that gender is related to variation in response to Sex Education programmes, but little qualitative work has been done to offer insights on the issues which contribute to these reactions (see Woodcock, Stenner and Ingham 1992; Carter and Carter 1993). In Chapters 4 – 7 we apply theoretical material on sexual socialisation and the development of gender identity in an attempt to understand the different reactions displayed by boys and girls to their Sex Education. In this chapter we focus on the girls’ reactions and the data we present are drawn primarily from a girls-only Sex Education lesson. Theories of Sexuality There is controversy over the nature of human sexual expression. Sexuality has been studied by a number of different disciplines and there is no real agreement among them. 1 At the heart of the controversy is the debate about the extent to which our sexuality is biologically determined, and is a ‘natural’, instinct, and the extent to which it is determined by social processes and context. Views about what constitutes ‘natural’ and ‘normal’ sexuality stem from, for example, religion, socio-biological traditions and psychoanalysis. These views influence both common-sense and institutional notions of sexuality, and consequently have implications for policy formulation. Our theoretical starting-point in studying adolescent sexuality and Sex Education is that sexual behaviour and sexuality are at least in part made and shaped by social learning (Weeks 1985; Giddens 1992; Seidman 1992): whichever aspect of the sexual self is considered ‘natural’, learning is involved...
- Beth St. Jean, Gagan Jindal, Yuting Liao, Paul T. Jaeger, Beth St. Jean, Gagan Jindal, Yuting Liao, Paul T. Jaeger(Authors)
- 2020(Publication Date)
- Emerald Publishing Limited(Publisher)
...CHAPTER 9 SEXUAL EDUCATION IS A HUMAN RIGHT: INFORMATION INEQUITIES OF K-12 SEXUAL EDUCATION AND LIBRARIANS’ ROLES IN SUPPORTING ADOLESCENTS’ SEXUAL HEALTH LITERACY Karina Kletscher ABSTRACT American Sex Education is continually under fire due to conflicting morals surrounding hegemonic sociocultural norms. These programs, and ultimately the students, are often victims of information inequities which leverage adult control over minors to prevent access to sexual health information. Withholding salient sexual health information infringes on intertwined tenets of human rights, such as education and information access. Spurred by recent disputes and barriers to updating unethical curricula in the states of Arizona and Texas, this chapter uses a human rights lens to explore the current information inequities in K-12 sexual education and students’ precarious positions in policy spaces. This framework demonstrates how libraries are uniquely protected spaces for intellectual freedom and the roles librarians can and should play as sexual health information providers in order to help students overcome information inequities. This chapter will provide recommendations for librarians and other educators to inform and organize advocacy as well as leverage current library operations to support adolescents’ sexual health literacy. Keywords: Sexual education; human rights; youth rights; information access; sexual health literacy; libraries INTRODUCTION Comprehensive sexual education (CSE) is foundational to functioning safely and healthily in a highly commercialized, consumption-oriented world (Magi & Garnar, 2015 ; Moore & Reynolds, 2018 ; Robinson, 2012). This curriculum is meant to explore and fill students’ information gaps, provide safe places for their learning and growth, and help them to develop sexual health literacy (SHL) (Kantor & Lindberg, 2020)...
