Dangerous Omissions: Abstinence-Only-Until-Marriage School-Based Sexuality Education and the Betrayal of LGBTQ Youth (original) (raw)

Sexuality Education in the United States: Shared Cultural Ideas across a Political Divide

''Sexuality education'' – broadly defined as teaching and learning about a range of issues related to puberty, sexuality, and relationships – occurs all day every day, formally and informally, intentionally and unintentionally. Nevertheless, adults organize policy and instruction for young people around a constrained set of concerns: first, that the sexuality education youth receive does not help them navigate an increasingly sexualized and dangerous world and, second, that the lessons are themselves damaging, exacerbating the risks youth and children already face. I discuss sexuality education's entanglement with these conventional cultural ideas about youth, sexuality, and education. I consider the ways that abstinence-only and comprehensive school-based sexuality education rest on a series of a discursive framings, including a commitment to regulating sexuality and youth, a contemporary ''moral panic'' that renders all talk about youth and sexuality provocative, and normative and instrumental conceptions of teaching and learning about sexuality. I conclude by discussing the implications of these discursive framings for classroom practice and imagining an alternative model in which sexuality education might embrace ambiguity and ambivalence as a necessary and even welcome condition of young people's sexuality and education.

Sexuality Education in the Public School System

Sexuality education is a topic that provokes a significant amount of interest, passion, and conflict among parents, educators, government, and public health agencies. This paper explores the two most common categories of sexuality education in the United States public schools today; abstinence-only-until-marriage education and comprehensive sexuality education. The elements of each philosophy will be introduced. Current research about the efficacy of each will be considered. Legal and ethical concerns will be discussed. Finally, this author's opinions about best practices for sexuality education in public school settings will be presented. The Evolution of Sexual Education in America The movement to include sexual health education in American schools has been traced to the World War I era. The spread of sexually transmitted infections (STIs) posed a serious problem among American soldiers. In response to this problem, the U.S. Congress enacted the Chamberlain-Kahn Act of 1918 (Whetten & Whitehead, 2022). This initiative aimed to educate servicemen about the hazards of sexual activity with women who were infected with STIs. Over the next few decades, the Public Health Board implemented various educational programs targeting sexual health and risk prevention (Sexual Health Alliance [SHA], 2021; Whetten & Whitehead, 2022). Abstinence-Only-Until-Marriage Education Abstinence-Only-Until-Marriage (AOUM) educational protocols are rooted in the notion that abstinence from sexual relations before marriage and complete fidelity afterward are the best deterrents to all risks associated with sexual activity, including unwanted pregnancy and the

Risky Business: Sexuality Education and Research in U.S. Schools

The authors explore recent efforts to push sexuality education and research for and about young people out of U.S. public schools. Their analysis focuses on two recent local instances in Lubbock, Texas, where young people unsuccessfully argued against abstinence-only education and for comprehensive instruction, and in Fairfax County, Virginia, where school administrators and school board members unsuccessfully tried to add questions about sexual behavior to an existing survey of risk behavior. These and other local debates reflect broader understandings of sexuality as a site of risk and schools as sites of protection from risk. The authors resist this understanding and argue that the real risk lies in failing to equip and support young people in their sexual lives. The article concludes with recommendations for how, first, to resist impoverished perspectives of sexuality as only risk and youth as only vulnerable and, second, to acknowledge young people’s subjectivity and embodiment.

Discourses of exclusion: Sexuality education's silencing of sexual others

Journal of Lgbt Youth, 2010

This article begins with a broad historical overview detailing how school-based sexuality education has been taught from a specific kind of heterosexual perspective that has excluded lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer-identified (LGBTQ) students as well as heterosexual students who do not fall along culturally dominant heterosexual lines. To illustrate such exclusionary sexuality education, we examine the discourses of exclusion in U.S.-based and international models of sexuality education. Then we turn to a continuum of sexuality education programs ranging from no sexuality education at all, abstinence-only, abstinence-based, to comprehensive, and anti-oppressive approaches. We conclude by offering ideas about the ideal characteristics or qualities needed for sexuality education to be inclusive of LGBTQ youth. This would not only stem the tide of the negative impact exclusionary sexuality education practices have had on these youth, but also such an educational experience-which would involve an inclusive interdisciplinary approach across the curriculum-would likely be beneficial in a variety of ways to all students.

Denying the sexual subject: schools' regulation of student sexuality

British Educational Research Journal, 2007

This article examines some of the discourses and practices through which schools produce and regulate student sexual identities. It suggests that schools' 'official culture' can be seen as a discursive strategy which identifies a preferred student subject that is 'non-sexual'. This preference is ...

Queering Sex Education

2011

Many emancipatory efforts aimed at increasing the visibility and acceptance of lesbian, gay and transgendered youth are evident in the political and legislative life of Western society. Far from being bridges for dialogue around difference, schools are becoming sites of ideological and political conflict regarding appropriate interpretation of sexuality. Ever since the time of Dewey’s seminal research in Democracy and Education what has persisted or constantly resurfaced in education has been the need to develop students' critical thinking and imbuing them with values of social life. In an increasingly diverse and pluralistic postmodern culture with its emphasis on individuality and subjectivity, imbuing students with a clear sense of shared values is challenging. Still, the formation of an ethically grounded public identity is an important objective of education. This paper discusses how queer theory, properly understood, can provide a valuable and critical approach to question...

A Historical Analysis of Public School Sex Education in America Since 1900

2009

This thesis explored the history of American public school sex education since 1900. It identified key points in sex education development. Six historical events were highlighted: (1) The social hygiene and the birth control movements, (2) research by Alfred Kinsey, (3) the sexual revolution, (4) creation of SIECUS, (5) the discovery of AIDS and, 6) the reform of the welfare system. An interpretation of these factors suggested: (1) countercultural voices of previous eras have become the dominant voices in current sex education, (2) the philosophical development of "comprehensive" sex education was linked to a personal justification of unconventional sexual behaviors, (3)