Making The Case For Multidisciplinary Sex Ed

Assuming you lived in a state that provided access to sex education, which of your courses would deliver this information? Most sex education is taught in biology or physical health classes with one or two lesson units between middle and high school. One compelling argument that I have found recently is a case to teach sex education in a multidisciplinary approach spanning several years of a student’s education in both social studies and physical science courses. Doing so could drive down teen pregnancy, empower youth about their own sexual health, and change the narratives and misinformation teens receive about sexuality. 

Leaders in sex education have begun to incorporate lessons on health as early as preschool. Early childhood sexuality education standards from The Future of Sex Ed include discussions on parts of the body, touching, and relationships with family members and friends. Middle school curriculum covers gender, puberty, relationships, and sexual orientation. High school students then receive content on sexual health, contraception, consent, and gender and sexuality. Sustained, age appropriate lessons are crucial to developing healthy teens, and it’s time to rethink the traditional academic delivery of content. 

Maryland, for instance, has implemented a sustained approach to teaching sexuality education throughout middle and high school.  A recent article in the Washington Post explains one health educator’s approach to presenting seventh graders with information about consent. Courtney Marcoux uses contemporary analogies to connect with her 7th grade students, but this is not the first time they have been exposed to the term “consent.” As of July 1, 2018, students in Montgomery County, MD are exposed to lessons on consent in 5th, 7th, and 10th grade. This is because the state passed legislation requiring these discussions in middle and high school. In response to the #MeToo movement, the bill ultimately aims to teach consent in sex education classes as a tactic to reduce sexual harassment and sexual assault on college campuses.

Consent In The Digital Age: Lessons From Katie Hill

Earlier this year RedState and Daily Mail published nude photographs of Congresswoman Katie Hill (D-CA) without her consent after her husband leaked the photos to those platforms, also without her consent. I will not minimize the serious implications of other allegations facing Hill about the ethics of a relationship with a former staff member, but I am not here to dissect every angle of this story. 

There are many lessons to learn from Katie Hill, about gender norms, ethics, power dynamics, victim blaming, and consent. Katie Hill is the first prominent female politician to experience this nonconsensual cyber exploitation, but she won’t be the last in the digital era. The former Congresswoman has since resigned, releasing a statement to her constituents explaining her departure. After a brief digital hiatus, Hill was back on Twitter, vowing to continue the fight against revenge porn and to call attention to advocacy efforts on cyber exploitation. I would like to explore what consent in the digital age means for students because what happened to Katie Hill on the national stage can happen to youth in schools.

We know that students engage with social media platforms every day. With ease and wide accessibility, communicating through social media and photo sharing is the norm for the so called “iGen.” The jump from digital communication to full blown “sexting” (Sex + Texting) among adolescents is overwhelming school leaders who are trying to confront sexting among high school and even middle school students. Sexting includes sending or possessing written, audio, or visual messages with explicit sexual content. Washington State schools include the act of viewing sexually explicit content in their definition of sexting found in the 2019 student conduct booklet titled “Rights and Responsibilities in the Digital Age.”

Let's Talk About Sex (Education Inequity)!

College is too late to expose students to facts about their own anatomy or to introduce tools for informed, consensual decision-making. I began my career at a liberal arts university in South Carolina where I focused on social justice education and sexual assault prevention. I quickly realized that many undergraduate students were receiving information on consent, healthy relationships, and sexual health for the first time. Sexual assault prevention work will not be effective if a measurable percentage of the student body had no prior foundation of sex education. I began to explore the national landscape of sex education and found an urgent social justice issue. 

The current state of sex education in the United States is inadequate and inequitable. Sexual health disparities on the basis of race and ethnicity are clear and alarming nationwide, especially in states that do not mandate sex education in any form or those that require an abstinence only curriculum. 26 states in this nation omit essential sex education from their curricula by mandating a stress on abstinence only information, (Lowen, 2019). We as a nation employ deficit-based thinking to blame teenagers for their choices and behavior, yet we fail to recognize the system that withholds the education students need to be informed and healthy young adults. When comprehensive, fact-based sexual health education is systematically withheld, we can see disproportionate rates of teenage pregnancy and HIV transmission in Black and brown youth. 

Let’s examine what’s not working. Texas, for example, does not require HIV information or contraception in its sex education curriculum for public schools. If – and the key word is if – sexual health information on HIV or contraception is offered in Texas, it must be taught from an abstinence-only framework (Guttmacher Institute, 2019).

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