Religious exemptions to the anti-discrimination act should end to ensure fear mongering and misinformation are not present in our schools.
A page from a 1934 sex education manual that, like many of its era, managed to be less about sex than about policing racial boundaries.
RPH West, Facts about Ourselves for Growing Boys and Girls (Public Health Department of the City of Johannesburg and the South African Red Cross Society, 1934). Wits Historical Papers, South African Institute of Race Relations Collection, AD 843 RJ/NA 18.
In South Africa’s segregated pre-apartheid state, even sex education was racialised. Christian missionaries had very different lessons for black and white children.
This column will examine how sex, gender, and sexuality impact physical and mental wellbeing and how these issues shape, and are shaped by, the types of societies we build and value.
Frits Ahlefeldt-Laurvig/Flickr
“What do you do?” It’s a question that always makes my heart sink, which aspect of what I do should I highlight in the answer to this minefield of a question. The answer must be brief because the attention…
It may be a taboo discussion but let’s face the reality.
Porn by Shutterstock
Technology to filter porn from children is clearly not enough to protect them.
A Danish professor has called on schools to screen pornography so students are prepared to see it in the real world. Is a classroom really the place though?
Shutterstock
A new report from MPs on the Education Select Committee calling for sex education to be made statutory, has much in it to be welcomed by those who have been campaigning for improvements in the provision…
Would sex ed have changed anything?
Teenage pregancy via Photographee.eu/Shutterstock
Proposals to force all schools to teach a compulsory sex education curriculum from primary level up and to restrict the right of parents to opt-out their children are back on the parliamentary agenda…
Familiar methods.
Banana and condom via bajinda/Shutterstock
Britain is not unique when it comes to debating how it should educate children and young people about sex. But the country approaches the subject with a particularly British sense of embarrassment and…
Tongue tied now, chat later.
Kissing by Shutterstock
A recent TV programme on “the secret life of students” followed a group of students in their first undergraduate year at Leicester University, including 18-year-old Aiden who was informed on screen that…
Recent reports have suggested that Section 28-style bans on the promotion of homosexuality are on the rise in UK schools, causing concern among teachers’ unions. Based on research by the British Humanist…
Strict regulation of children’s sexual knowledge can increase prejudice about differences.
Kim Cofino
In the fields of gender, sexuality, and sexual health research, it’s a no-brainer that sex education should start early, and that sex should be discussed often – both in schools and at home. But instead…