The ignoble history of sexuality education
The phrase ‘Comprehensive Sexuality Education’ (CSE) has been used by international charities and campaigning organisations for around three decades now. However, the key ideas that underpin the practice of CSE have been far longer in development. One major event was the founding of the Institute for Sex Research at Indiana University in the US in 1947 under the leadership of ‘sexologist’ Alfred Kinsey. Kinsey’s research purported to show that children are sexual beings from birth and that promiscuity of all kinds is widespread and therefore normal. For Kinsey, it was not human sexuality but social norms that needed to change.
In 1964, Dr. Mary Calderone, a follower of Kinsey’s work, founded the Sexuality Information and Education Council of the United States (SIECUS). Like Kinsey, Calderone believed society needed to move away from traditional views of sexuality and become ‘sex positive’. This carried into the work of SIECUS on sex education which moved away from ‘negative’ messages around pregnancy and disease and focused instead on the positive expression of their sexuality for people of all ages. The idea that even the youngest children are sexual beings with a right to sexual pleasure, and that social norms must be challenged until this is accepted, now dominates CSE as promoted by UNESCO, the WHO and IPPF.
Research for the European Parliament notes the continent’s long history of school sex education, beginning in Sweden in 1955 and followed by many other countries over subsequent decades. Sex education became mandatory in schools in West Germany in 1968 and in Denmark, Finland and Austria in 1970. This coincided with the development and availability of the birth control pill and the legalization of abortion in many countries during the 1970s and 1980s. Such developments made the separation of sex from reproduction possible and helped trigger what became known as the ‘sexual revolution’. As WHO notes, ‘Values and norms related to sexuality started to shift and sexual behaviour began to change, or at least lost its extreme taboo character.’ At this point, schools were generally responding to, rather than seeking to create, a more socially permissive climate.
In the UK too, sex education began to become both more widely available and more expansive in the 1970s. Topics such as contraception began to be covered in some schools although normally as part of the science curriculum rather than connected to more general guidance on relationships. The European Parliament’s 2013 report, Policies for Sexuality Education in the European Union, notes that in Hungary, sex education was introduced in 1978 with the classes on ‘Sexual and Family Life’, offered to pupils aged between 14 and 18. Classes focused on topics such as ‘the moral basis for sexual relationships, sexual characteristics, the place of the family in society, the place of the child in the family.’
The European Parliament’s 2022 report, Comprehensive Sexuality Education: why is it important?, points to sex education changing over time to reflect public health priorities:
It started with the prevention of unintended pregnancy (1960s–1970s), then moved on to include the prevention of the Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) (1980s) and awareness about sexual abuse (1990s). Later, it also embraced the prevention of sexism, homophobia and online bullying (2000s), and finally, today, gender norms and reflections on gender inequality have become important topics in sexuality education.
This outline shows that, as sex education has developed, it has not just reflected changing health priorities but changing political objectives; the boundary between health and morality has been blurred. In the 2000s, lessons increasingly began to focus on the prevention of sexism and homophobia and, later, challenging gender norms particularly as expressed through pornography. Political objectives now sit alongside moral and biological concerns.
Concern to move beyond sex and promote ‘sexuality education’ was noted at the International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD) held in Cairo in 1994. The conference called on national governments ‘to provide education to improve adolescents’ well-being, encourage gender equality and ensure the protection of their reproductive health’. The ICPD’s Programme of Action was adopted by 179 governments in 1994 and by the United Nations General Assembly in July 1999. According to the United Nations Population Fund, ‘Delegates from all regions and cultures agreed that reproductive health is a basic human right.’
The involvement of the ICPD and the UN Population Fund demonstrates that sex education was, in the mid-1990s, moving beyond the remit of individual schools and national governments and becoming a tool for supranational organisations. Significantly, the first groups to propose something akin to today’s CSE were not specifically concerned with education, or even with children, but with population and development. In the 1990s, there was growing concern with the economic and environmental consequences of growing population levels, particularly in developing countries. The ICPD’s Programme of Action was promoted as representing ‘the last opportunity in the twentieth century for the international community to collectively address the critical challenges and interrelationships between population and development.’
Stemming population growth would, it was assumed, lead to greater national prosperity. As the UN Population Fund makes clear: ‘Education is one of the most important means of empowering women with the knowledge, skills and self-confidence necessary to participate fully in the development process.’ Higher levels of education, including lessons in gender equality and contraception were expected to empower girls to have fewer babies and thereby liberate them to enter the labour market. This seemingly positive message emboldened the UN and the ICPD to intervene more directly in the affairs of families and nations. It noted that,
Parents and schools should ensure that attitudes that are respectful of women and girls as equals are instilled in boys from the earliest possible age, along with an understanding of their shared responsibilities in all aspects of a safe, secure and harmonious family life.
Preventing the transmission of HIV was a major concern of governments and supranational organisations at this point. In the US, it was noted that, ‘instruction about contraception, about how to say no to sex and about condoms was much less common than education about HIV and AIDS.’ The Guttmacher Institute, a global policy organization ‘committed to advancing sexual and reproductive health and rights’, was one of the first groups to call for a focus on sexual and reproductive health that was ‘not merely the absence of disease, dysfunction or infirmity but a state of physical, emotional, mental and social well-being in all aspects of sexuality and reproduction.’ Nonetheless, in the US, abstinence remained the primary message of sex education classes until the late 1990s. A 1999 survey of public school district superintendents found that 23 per cent of all school districts in the US operated an ‘abstinence-only policy’ which prohibited discussion of contraception other than to emphasize its shortcomings. This suggests that although the roots of CSE can be traced back to the mid-1990s, it was to be another decade before classroom practice began to change significantly.
A Guttmacher Institute report published in 2000 noted that there is no evidence,
demonstrating that abstinence-only programs have actually delayed the onset of sexual intercourse or reduced any measure of sexual activity. Conversely, there is growing evidence that comprehensive programs reduce sexual activity, pregnancy rates and birthrates.
It was keen to promote the fact that,
Western European teenage pregnancy rates, birthrates and abortion rates, all of which are lower than—and many of which are a fraction of—U.S. rates, and have been achieved without any reliance on abstinence-only education programs.
In this way, the growth of a more holistic sexuality education was not only a backlash against more conservative abstinence-based sex education programmes but could also be shown to be more successful in reducing teenage pregnancy rates. There was no acknowledgement that the relationship between non-abstinence based sex education and declining teenage pregnancy rates may be one of correlation not causation.
The 2000s saw a gradual move away from promoting sexuality education in relation to positive health or reproductive outcomes and, instead, situating it within a human rights discourse. The European Parliament notes that in 2007, the Human Rights committee of the UN encouraged the Polish Ministry of Education to provide proper and impartial school-based sexuality education. The shift from a health-focus to a rights-focus enabled sexuality education to cover a far broader range of social, emotional, physical and psychological themes.
It is notable that when the German Federal Centre for Health Education (BZgA) published Standards for Sexuality Education in Europe in 2010, it referred to holistic sexuality education’ but, just six years later it changed to using the phrase ‘comprehensive sexuality education’ because ‘by that time all relevant international organisations had started using the latter terminology.’ As IPPF and BZgA noted in 2018, ‘sexuality education is now the rule in the European region’ and ‘the WHO/BZgA Standards for Sexuality Education in Europe (2010) was used extensively in making this progress.’
Ironically perhaps, the expanding remit of CSE, although welcomed by campaigning organisations and supranational institutions, has also sparked concern that the focus on ‘sexuality’ is being lost in the push to promote a broader human rights-based agenda. In 2016, IPPF published a report entitled, ‘Putting sexuality back into Comprehensive Sexuality Education.’ It emphasised ‘the importance of maintaining the focus on sexuality as we work together to advance implementation of CSE programmes locally, nationally, regionally and globally.’ The report’s authors felt the need to
remind our community of educators, programmers and advocates that ultimately sexuality education programmes aim to support and empower adolescents to make free and informed choices about their sexuality, recognising that expressions of sexuality are a core part of the human experience, and as complex and deserving of attention as any other aspect of our lives.
That it was deemed necessary to issue such a statement is a sign of how successful CSE has been in adapting to an ever-changing array of social and political priorities. In the space of three decades, CSE has moved from being a little known concept to an international movement dedicated to changing attitudes towards sexuality, gender identity, relationships, gender equality, marriage and the family.