Michelle Templeton

Michelle is a research fellow at Queen’s University Belfast. Her research largely focuses on designing, delivering and evaluating sexuality and relationships education with young men in a prison setting. She is interested in understanding the context and the wider social dimensions that influence sexual and reproductive health decision-making and the impact of this on young people's sexual health and well-being. This has important implications for young people's sexual health, sexual rights, and for relationships, parenting and gender-equality more broadly. Michelle is also skilled in children’s rights-based participation and has worked with many children and young people to deliver projects for government and international agencies, which have produced child-friendly versions of complex materials on issues such as sexual exploitation, for the Council of Europe, Eurochild and the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child. She is a qualified sexual health facilitator and child protection officer, and has vast experience working with children and young people on sensitive issues and controversial topics. She is interested in the social construction of gender in/equality, sexual rights and sexual health, particularly in adolescents. Other current research interest include inequalities in health by social class and ethnicity as well as gender, and lay understandings of health related behaviours.