“What is surprising is the consistency of the findings across
different countries and over the 25 years that the study spans,”
said lead author Pandora Pound of the School of Social and Community
Medicine at the University of Bristol in the U.K.
The researchers reviewed 48 studies of students, young adults or
adults age 25 and younger recalling their experiences of
school-based sex and relationship education. They included studies
conducted between 1990 and 2015 in the U.K., Ireland, the U.S.,
Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Japan, Iran, Brazil and Sweden.
In general, people recalled their schools as reluctant to
acknowledge that sex is potentially embarrassing, instead treating
it like any other subject. Young people said the lessons made them
feel vulnerable, with young men afraid to appear inexperienced and
young women risking sexual harassment if they participated.
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Schools often did not accept that students were already sexually
active, according to some students. Having their teachers deliver
information about sex blurred boundaries in their relationships,
they said, and some teachers seemed embarrassed or poorly trained.
Some young people criticized the overly scientific approach to sex,
presenting sex as a problem to be solved rather than acknowledging
pleasure and desire. Women were often depicted as passive, men as
predatory and there was little or no discussion of gay, bisexual or
transgender sex.
Many programs did not address the availability of community health
services, what young people should do if they got pregnant, the pros
and cons of different methods of contraception or the emotions that
might accompany sexual relationships, according to the study results
reported in BMJ Open.
There is evidence from other studies that sex education varies by
school, but in this study student responses were generally
consistent even in different countries, Pound told Reuters Health by
email.
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“Young people's feedback indicates that when sex education is
negative, heterosexist - or in any other way seems irrelevant to
their experiences, or judgmental - they switch off,” she said. “If
young people aren't engaged with their sex and relationship
education then valuable opportunities for learning and discussion
are lost.”
Properly training and assigning sex educators would help address at
least some of the gaps in sex education, she said.
“The content of (sex and relationship) programs needs to be
improved, but in addition these programs need to be delivered by
trained experts who enjoy and are confident about their work, and -
crucially - are able to maintain clear boundaries with students,”
Pound said.
SOURCE: http://bit.ly/2cBO0mw BMJ Open, online September 13, 2016.
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