Keywords

“Sex ed.” For many of us, the term conjures images of painful lectures delivered by poorly trained and visibly uncomfortable physical education teachers, angry parents protesting their school’s distribution of condoms, anachronistic films documenting the journey of sperm up the fallopian tubes, and pubescent teens giggling at mentions of menstruation and secondary sex characteristics. Or perhaps the more optimistic among us imagine workshops facilitated by charismatic educators who exalt the importance of birth control, deftly slip condoms onto demonstration bananas, and remain unflappable and empathetic as they demystify puberty for bewildered youth. These admittedly stereotypical portraits of “sex ed” parody the highly contested landscape of sexuality education . The values and assumptions they reflect also make it difficult for educators and researchers to reach beyond conventional ideas about modesty, reproduction, coupling, and health to a more expansive vision of what it could mean to teach and learn about sexuality.

In the discussion that follows, we work from a definition of sexuality education that recognizes all the lessons that young people receive about bodies, relationships, desires, and sex, in formal and informal instruction, and in and out of schools. We understand that an education in sexuality occurs across the lifespan, across institutions and contexts, and in planned and intentional lessons as well as hidden or implicit moments of learning. The complicated terrain of sexuality education is, in part, an effect of the volatility of these two terms: sexuality and education. Like many of our colleagues and peers, we use “sexuality education” to open up the narrow casting of “sex ed” beyond the classroom-based lessons offered as part of an official curriculum. However, we do not presume to have eased the conflicts inherent to sexuality education with this shift in terminology.

Instead, we believe that bringing these contested concepts together, each dense with histories of conflict over their reach and meanings, exposes the underside of “sex ed.” Even as we recognize that sexuality is learned across a range of institutions, relationships and structures, we also cast doubt on the confidence that we can predict the learning that goes under the name of “sexuality education.” Can sex be educated (Britzman 1998)? This question requires an expansive understanding of both sexuality and education, and while those of us who think about sexuality education are accustomed to recognizing the expansiveness of sexuality, we are less used to seeing education as similarly varied, conflicted and contextual. “Sexuality education” is an awkward soldering together of theories of sexuality with theories of teaching and learning. Critical research on sexuality education requires not only reaching beyond readily available definitions of sexuality but also rethinking the usual theories of teaching and learning. Sexuality education of all kinds must, first, move beyond an instrumentalist approach to teaching that veers close to behavior modification and, second, move toward learning that promotes ethical and democratic exploration and development (Fields 2008; Gilbert 2014; Lamb 2010).

Moving toward an expansive definition of sexuality education encourages heightened consideration of “the stakes” of teaching and learning about sexuality in and out of schools and the constrained set of worries that drives policy and instruction for young people. These worries are varied: for example, that the sexuality education youth receive does not help them navigate an increasingly sexualized and dangerous world and that the lessons are themselves damaging, exacerbating the risks children and youth already face. Sexuality education has long been a response to adults’ concerns about the well-being of young people and the integrity of the family and society. At the very least, sexuality education must address itself to the contemporary terrain of young people’s sexual lives: from panics over young people “sexting” to adults’ continuing calls for young people to be abstinent, from the development of national sexuality education standards to rising concerns over the safety of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer (LGBT/Q) youth in schools. And yet, even as sexuality education encompasses all these issues, its project is greater and more complicated than these worries, lessons, and occurrences suggest. Experiences of sexuality education are never straightforward. Instead, they are informed by and modify larger discourses of race, class, gender, ability, sexual orientation , religion, and other social differences. Sexuality education is similarly not confined to specially designated classes in primary and secondary schools, including health and family studies. Instead teaching and learning happen in hallways, playgrounds, shopping malls, churches, homes, popular culture, and on social media.

In this chapter, as we trace the historical and contemporary debates about the status of sexuality education in schools, we mine these debates for the underlying and enduring assumptions about sexuality and education that invoke conflict and controversy. In particular, we pay attention to how changing ideas about sexuality and education modulate the kinds of programs and interventions offered to young people and the tenor of scholarly conversation. One aim is to survey what we know about sexuality education and how this knowledge has shaped and constrained policy and practice landscapes. Another task is to ask how our confidence in “knowledge,” embodied by the turn to discourses of science and health, defends against the uncertainty of teaching and learning. We conclude the chapter by focusing on the ambiguity and uncertainty that is part of the work of teaching and learning about sexuality. We restrict our attention to teaching and learning about puberty, sexuality, and relationships in schools. Readers interested in families, the Internet, and other sources of sexuality education should consult other chapters (see Martin, Chap. 19, this volume).

1 A History of Educating Sexuality

Debates about sexuality education can seem utterly contemporary. Sexting, LGBT/Q issues, the sexualization of girls—each emerging controversy is cast as new and unprecedented. Each seemingly new issue, however, gestures toward and often repeats a history linking sexuality to worries about the moral, psychological, and physical well-being of young people (Carlson 2012). And education, for its part, is repeatedly called upon as the cure for these worries. At the turn of the twentieth century, public officials in the United States grew concerned the nation was ill-prepared to contend with the sexual temptations associated with increasing urbanization (Carter 2001; Moran 2000). Over the course of the next century, many policy makers and educators came to believe that public health would be well served by “social hygiene,” “family life,” and “puberty” education in the schools (Moran 2000). Change was not unidirectional. Schools would be tasked with responding to these “contemporary” worries and maintaining the status quo, affirming the importance of family life, and educating young people out of sexual deviance . Even as these advocates called for schools to take up the task of teaching children and youth about sexual well-being, young people’s education about sexual health and relationships continued to be primarily the parents’ responsibility in the early twentieth century (Kendall 2008), and the education they did receive at school affirmed heteronormative ideals about students’ sexual lives.

Sexuality education was reimagined in the wake of the social movements of the 1960s, and the public health focus of the earlier twentieth century was augmented by a new focus on the rights of girls and women. The best time and place to teach and learn about sexuality continued to be debated in the second half of the century as the feminist, youth, and gay rights movements wrought significant changes in U.S. sexual values (Luker 2006; Moran 2000). Though the sexual and gender revolutions of the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s were neither uninterrupted nor uncontested, the widespread availability of contraception, legalized abortion, liberalization of divorce laws, and new sexual harassment laws helped make greater freedom and agency in private and public relationships seem possible for women and girls. As same-sex desire and expression became increasingly visible, LGBT/Q people also made new claims to a right to live free of discrimination. In the 1980s and 1990s, HIV/AIDS represented a significant public health crisis. Many sexuality educators responded with disciplining lessons that affirmed sexual conformity and punished sexual difference (Patton 1996), but the epidemic also reinvigorated the link between sexuality education and human rights and introduced into schools conversations that challenged homophobia and affirmed LGBT/Q youth.

Contemporary conflicts over sexuality education inherit the effects of these broader “culture wars” that arose in the wake of the sexual, youth and civil rights revolutions of the 1960s, “when it seemed as if all of American society might implode” (Luker 2006, p. 68; see also Hunter 1992). In a two-decade study, Kristin Luker conducted more than 100 interviews with adults living in U.S. communities embroiled in sexuality education debates. She argues these debates are ultimately “about how men and women relate to each other in all realms of their lives” (2006, p. 69) and, like other post-1960s battles, the conflict over sexuality education is caught in a clash between two poles—sexual conservatism and sexual liberalism. In the 1990s, in the United States, this conflict pitted conservative advocates of abstinence-only sex education against the more liberal supporters of comprehensive sex education.

Social conservatives entered late-twentieth-century school-based sex education debates insisting that the only way to keep young people safe from the physical, social, and emotional consequences of sex is to insist that they abstain from having sex beyond the confines of heterosexual marriage. Abstinence-only education thus centers the “traditional” male-headed heterosexual nuclear family and positions other models of sexual relations as a threat to the individual and the community. For supporters, abstinence-only education is a logical response to concerns over teen pregnancies, HIV, and other sexually transmitted infections (STIs) and an overall assault on conventional understandings of gender, family. and sexual expression. Reflecting what C. J. Pascoe refers to as the “twin assumptions that American teens are too innocent to know about sex and too sexual to be trusted with information” (2007, p. 29), abstinence-only programs posit that young people equipped with sexual knowledge are more likely to participate in sexual activities.

Socially liberal educators, advocates, and policy makers responded to arguments for abstinence-only education by promoting school-based comprehensive sexuality education , where teachers would emphasize abstinence as one strategy among others—condoms and contraceptives, for example—that students could adopt to protect their health and wellbeing. While comprehensive educators routinely assert that sexual abstinence is the best choice for youth (Fields 2008; Santelli 2006), comprehensive sexuality education might also include lessons on masturbation and abortion as well as information about gender norms and identities and lesbian, gay, and bisexual sexualities. Comprehensive programs are often organized around a hope that “accurate knowledge, received in a timely fashion, will prepare youth to enter into the world of sexual activity” (Sandlos 2011, p. 307). This belief holds that, when equipped with proper and correct knowledge about sexuality, young people will make better sexual decisions, including decisions to postpone sexual behavior and to practice safe sex.

This fight between abstinence-only and comprehensive sex education has indelibly affected the landscape of sex education across the United States by defining what counts as sex education and establishing the terms for debate about sexuality in schools. In a recent report on the status of sexuality and HIV education programs in each of the states, the Guttmacher Institute reports that 25 states require sexuality education programs to stress abstinence. In a further 12 states, educators must cover abstinence as one option among many of protecting youth from sexual risks and dangers, while 30 states require educators to inform students as to the perceived negative outcomes of teen sex. In 19 states, educators must stress the importance of having sex only within the confines of marriage. Within sexuality education programs, only 19 states require educators to discuss contraception. Twenty states require sexuality education classes to counsel teens about healthy decision-making. The numbers are even more dismal for conversations about sexual orientation—just 13 states require inclusive approaches to considering LGBT/Q issues, while three require that educators offer negative instruction about LGBT/Q sexualities.

2 A Sense of Danger

The abstinence-vs.-comprehensive account of contemporary sexuality education debates offers a fair rendering of the political landscape. However, researchers’ access to school-based sexuality education is increasingly limited (Fields and Tolman 2006; Kendall 2012, p. 20, 21), making it difficult to observe the relationship between, on the one hand, policy and debate and, on the other, classroom practice. The limited research available suggests teachers resist formal sexuality education policies and agendas with which they feel uncomfortable (Fields 2008; Hess 2010; Kendall 2012). Thus, knowing a school is formally an “abstinence-only school” does not mean we know the classroom instruction is in practice abstinence-only.

The two-camp account of the sexuality debate also obscures the reality that divisions in the battle over school-based abstinence and comprehensive sexuality programs are not absolute. Interrelated ideas, values, and norms undergird these programs (Fields 2008; Irvine 2002; Kendall 2012). Many educators and policymakers are left feeling that they must choose between these two seemingly-polarized discourses, while critical education theorists have noticed that the discourses that characterize these debates are themselves a product and condition of the conflicts, “traditions and resolutions [that] incorporate one another” (Lesko 2010, p. 281).

Indeed, abstinence-only and comprehensive sexuality education “rely on their opposition” to each other (Lesko 2010, p. 281). Policies and curricula may suggest discrete curricular options, but abstinence-only and comprehensive sexuality education programs share assumptions about youth, sexuality, and learning: that teen sexuality is a site of danger and risk; that such danger and risk is a site of profound worry among adults; and that sexuality education is a necessary, rational, and corrective response to that danger, risk and, worry (Fields 2008; Fields and Tolman 2006; Kendall 2012).

Comprehensive and abstinence-only curricula also share ideas about youth. The cultural, political and social shifts of late-twentieth-century social movements may have been welcome to many, but they have also exacerbated a sense–even among many supporters—that both sexuality and adolescence are sites of risk and danger and that education’s role is to ease the risks young people face in their sexual lives (Bay-Cheng 2013; Levine 2002; Robinson 2013). Not surprisingly, then, much contemporary policymaking, public debate, and research on sexuality education focuses on offering children and youth lessons about avoiding sexual danger: will young people learn what they need to avert risk? Invoking concerns with health and prevention, adults organize policy and instruction for young people around the conventional worry that the sexuality education youth encounter in schools may not help them navigate an increasingly sexualized and dangerous world.

Policy and instruction are also motivated by another worry: that sexuality education’s lessons are themselves damaging, exacerbating the sexual risks youth and children already face (Fields 2008; Heins 2001; Levine 2002). These worries, so trenchant that they have come to define what counts as sexuality education, span political positions. Sexual liberals and sexual conservatives, to borrow Kristin Luker’s (2006) terms, worry that sexuality education puts young people in danger—though the dangers liberals and conservatives perceive may differ. And both camps also see education as a prophylactic against those dangers. Education is both a cause of and cure for danger.

These shared ideas are evident in policy offered across the U.S. political spectrum. Since the 1980s, the U.S. government has supported educational programs that emphasize chastity, self-discipline, and abstinence as strategies for stemming the problems understood to arise from teen sexual activity. The 1996 Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act, enacted by the Democratic administration of Bill Clinton, increased federal support (and required state grantees to provide matching funds) for “abstinence education.” Qualified programs would instruct students in the “social, psychological, and health gains” that come with confining sexual expression to heterosexual marriage and the “harmful psychological and physical effects” of sexual activity and parenting outside marriage (Waxman 2004).

More recently, Democratic President Barack Obama came through on an early election promise and eliminated much direct funding for abstinence-only education and instead funded an Office of Adolescent Health (OAH) to administer over $ 100 million in new support for evidence-based teen pregnancy prevention approaches (Wagoner 2009). OAH funding effectively reversed the second Bush administration’s consistent and increasing support for abstinence-only programming. Ironically, the OAH commitment to teen pregnancy prevention also affirms a long-established and conventional approach to sexuality education as a grudging response to vexing social problems. OAH-sponsored teen pregnancy prevention programming might take the form of “comprehensive sexuality education,” much to the dismay of those advocating abstinence-only education. Nevertheless, the OAH focus on sexual behaviors–and heterosexual intercourse in particular–threatens to come at the expense of discussing a range of sexual identities, desires, and institutions. The concern with teen pregnancy highlights harmful consequences of heterosexual behaviors for self and society and once again commits education to the conservative aim of promoting the personal and social regulation of young people’s sexuality.

These controversies and conflicts draw on an inclination Amy Schalet (2004) argues is characteristic of U.S. adults: parents, educators, and policy makers “dramatize adolescent sexuality” by highlighting conflict between parents and children, antagonism between girls and boys, and the threat of youth being overwhelmed by new sexual feelings and experiences. Schalet’s comparative interviews with Dutch parents highlight the distinctiveness of the dramatizing model that animates sexuality education policy in the United States. Few U.S. girls “are assumed capable of the feelings and relationships that legitimate sexual activity,” leaving them vulnerable to charge of “slut” (Schalet 2011, p. 325). Dutch girls, on the other hand, living within a normalizing paradigm of sexuality, “are assumed to be able to fall in love and form steady sexual relationships.” This assumption defends against an equation of sexual activity with “sluttiness,” though the assumption may also “obscure the challenges of negotiating differences” in sexual relationships (Schalet 2011, p. 325). In the United States, notions of good parenting conflict with the possibility of parents and guardians recognizing and supporting their children’s sexual development, desires, and agency (Bay-Cheng 2013; Elliott 2012). Together, these images and tropes reflect and buttress ideals of youth as free of sexual experience and knowledge and therefore reliant upon adults’ guidance and protection.

These idealized and dramatizing images generate not only ideals to which youth and parents are held but also means of sorting young people into a range of categories: the innocent and the guilty, the vulnerable and the predatory, the pure and the corrupting, those who are “fully participating and valued members of their classrooms and broader communities and those who are not” (Fields and Hirschman 2007, p. 11; see also Angelides 2004). Both conservative and liberal advocates need made-up and archetypal children on which to base their compelling arguments for school-based sexuality education. Images of virgins, pregnant teens, promiscuous girls, predatory boys, suicidal gay students, doomed teens, and confused youth help to clarify and heighten the stakes in debates over curricular goals and social agendas (Connell and Elliott 2009; Fields 2008; Irvine 2002). Will schools help to protect at-risk lesbian, gay, and bisexual youth from bullying, depression, and suicide? Will teachers help vulnerable girls and boys navigate a sexual world that threatens to be undone by a relaxing of gender norms, even among youth? Will communities help baffled teens get the information they need, even if their parents fail to provide the necessary guidance at home? All young people seem “at risk” of being tainted by sexuality—their own or others—and this is a risk against which, advocates claim, education can best mitigate.

3 Sexuality Education’s Risky Lessons: Formal and Informal

The history of conflict over sexuality and youth permeates the formal and informal lessons young people receive in school. The early progressive hope that education could help young people build healthy, pro-social, sexual lives becomes, in schools, a litany of lessons about sexual morality that “socialize children into systems of inequality” (Connell and Elliott 2009, p. 84; see also Fields 2008). These lessons may claim neutrality and lean on a false sense of certainty; however, research consistently shows that sexuality education, from all political perspectives, routinely affirms oppressive values and norms about gender, race, and sexuality, even when presenting what appears to be rational, medically accurate information about bodies, disease and pregnancy prevention, and puberty (McClelland and Fine 2008; Santelli et al. 2006a; Waxman 2004).

At the center of school-based sexuality education stands the white, middle-class, Christian girl whose purity must be protected from predatory sexualities, embodied most dramatically by boys of color and queerness. All the lessons sexuality education offers seem to support this script. Lessons on menstruation and conception reinforce girls’ and women’s vulnerability and men’s virility (Diorio and Munro 2000; Martin 2001). Youth and families of color appear in textbooks and other instructional material primarily in discussions of risk and disease prevention (Fields 2008; García 2009; Whatley 1988). Much instruction and many curricular materials suggest that boys of all races are potential sexual predators. In a heteronormative sexuality education, this discourse prepares students for antagonistic sexual relationships between men and women. Even in sexuality education classrooms formally designated “comprehensive,” girls hear little talk from their teachers about female sexual desire (Fine 1988). Instead they hear that, as girls and women, they bear the responsibility of deflecting the inevitable, aggressive sexual advances of their male peers (Fields 2008; Fine 1988; Tolman 2002). Conversations about ethics, desire, and pleasure find little room in the sexuality education curriculum (Allen et al. 2013; Allen and Carmody 2012; Rasmussen 2004). Sharon Lamb’s [2013] curriculum for teaching sexuality education in grade nine through a study of secular ethics represents one important exception—an imaginative response to the stagnant terms of the culture wars.

In its current forms, no matter its formal designation—comprehensive or abstinence-only—sexuality education routinely reproduces social inequalities (Connell and Elliott 2009). Rooted in 1996 welfare reform, contemporary abstinence-only education is touted by proponents as a response to poverty and other social ills; thus conventional norms of heterosexual sexual modesty and coupling are presented as vital to not only individual but also social well-being (Fine and McClelland 2006). The sexual expression of poor people—including low-income youth—is subject to greater surveillance and intervention. The implications of this link between young people’s sexual activity and social decline extend into educational policy and practice. Jessica Fields (2008) found that in lower-income public schools students were more likely to encounter teachers beholden to the cultural authority of abstinence. Public school sexuality educators faced greater scrutiny and less support than their private school colleagues, and the least advantaged students received the most restrictive sexuality instruction. Only the relatively privileged private school students in Fields’ study heard in their sexuality education a call to sexual pleasure, agency, and knowledge. The public school students, by contrast, consistently heard they should mute their desires and equip themselves for the sexual world routinely imagined by abstinence-only instruction—a world marked by violence, risk and consequence.

Sexuality education’s lessons are also racialized. Ethnographic studies (Elliott 2012; Fields 2008; Kendall 2012) indicate policy makers, educators, and parents frequently cast some people’s sexuality as particularly conflictual and antagonistic. And, while white children and youth are often taken to be sexually innocent in risk-based discourses, African American girls and boys are routinely “adultified”—cast as “sinister, intentional, fully conscious [and] stripped of any element of childish naiveté” (Ferguson 2001, p. 83). Lorena García’s (2009) ethnographic research with Latina youth demonstrates the ways schools’ racialized structures further marginalize students already facing multiple oppressions by presuming white heterosexuality as a norm. White, middle-class sexuality gets positioned as the ideal of sexuality education as teachers monitor and discipline racialized students’ sexuality (Garcia 2009, p. 522; see also Fields 2008 and Pascoe 2007).

Normative notions of family also infuse sexuality education. Nancy Kendall found sexuality educators across the United States present “a particular mode of sex and sexuality that privilege[s] white, middle-class, straight, adult conceptualizations of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ sexual decision-making, behaviors and outcomes” (2012, p. 82). When their well-meaning teacher asked students to go home to talk about sex with their parents, Pacific Islander students resisted, explaining they feared their parents would disapprove and punish them for broaching the subject (p. 114). Kendall (2012) observed white sexuality educators who were confused and concerned about the way Native American elders treated pregnant teens in their communities. Having children young and out of wedlock did not garner the same kinds of stigma in Native American communities as it did in the white, middle-class communities in which the educators had grown up. And, while some Native teen mothers might want to return to school after giving birth, the school lacked parenting support programs and other in-school resources that would meet their needs as newly parenting teens. Such assumptions are difficult to dislodge. Even educators who, in the name of cultural sensitivity, alter their programming to address students of different cultural backgrounds are likely to try to bring students and families in line with white, middle-class values (Kendall 2012).

This narrow view of family informs the heteronormative ideas about sexuality and intimacy at the core of much sexuality education. Educators often shy away from lessons about lesbian, gay, bisexual, and queer sexuality and about transgender experiences, casting such lessons as provocative and controversial. Heteronormative school-based sexuality education systematically denies sexually active young people access to educational resources and adult support that would promote their well-being and health: for example, at the turn of the twenty-first century, students report receiving less information about birth control than they would like (Darroch et al. 2000), and teachers reported offering lessons on contraception later and less frequently than they reported a decade earlier (Kaiser Family Foundation 1999). In addition, those youth who identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, and queer contend with sexuality education that emphasizes heterosexual behaviors, desires, and relationships and that, through its refusal to address lesbian, gay, bisexual, and queer sexuality as anything other than sites of risk and deviance, denies nonconforming youth recognition as fully participating and valued members of their communities who are capable of creating and enjoying meaningful relationships with same-sex partners (Fields 2008; Gilbert 2006; Russell 2003). Under such a curricular and pedagogical regime, all students contend with stunted relational and affective possibilities—even in classrooms that are purportedly neutral (Fields 2005; Fields and Hirschman 2007).

Young people’s education in sexuality is not confined to the official classes and curriculum; across the school, young people encounter and engage with a “hidden,” “informal,” or “evaded” curricula (Apple 2004; Fields 2008). Lessons about sexuality and gender circulate, often unnoticed, throughout the school as policies, practices, curricula, and programs about sexuality meet and intersect with the everyday lives of students and teachers. These lessons take the form of implicit norms governing relationships between students and teachers; youths’ management of their own and others’ bodies; the social makeup of the school as well as broader community; and students, and teachers, responses to eruptions of homophobia, sexism, or racism in the classroom, lunchroom, and hallway.

School dress codes illustrate how sexuality is schooled through informal practices. Rules around dress—a particularly institutionalized site of extra-curricular sexuality education–assume heterosexual relations among students and suggest heterosexuality is itself a site of tension and conflict. Girls’ bodies and sexualities are regulated as potential distractions for male students: distractions must be minimized in order to protect schools’ “moral climate.” Dress codes thus reinforce sexuality education’s suggestion that boys cannot control themselves and must rely on girls’ greater capacity to control their own and others’ impulses (Raby 2012). Once again, girls are responsible for delaying sexual activity and ensuring everyone’s safety, health, and well-being.

Tensions between discipline and resistance are also evident. Students are subject to these rules, but they also enforce them–and young people’s participation lends the hidden, evaded, and informal curricula their power. Students resent rules and their enforcement even as they simultaneously scorn the behavior the rules are intended to curtail. The young women in Rebecca Raby’s study recognized the sexism undergirding their being assigned responsibility for the “moral climate” of their school; they also criticized the “frequency, inconsistency and inequality” of rule enforcement. However, they also valued these rules’ capacity to regulate the behavior and dress of “other” girls (p. 340). Students’ relationship to restrictive regimes becomes ambiguous as they enforce and endorse the very rules that constrain their self-expression.

Ultimately, sexuality education inside and outside the classroom and delivered by teachers and students affirms a “heterosexual imaginary” (Best 2000, p. 195). At times the lessons are embedded in the formal curriculum. Abstinence-only programs locate healthy and moral sexuality inside heterosexual marriage , denying LGBT/Q teens a sexual future (Fisher 2009). Other times the lessons are informal. Lesbian, gay, bisexual, and queer students and teachers often experience schools as unfriendly and even dangerous places marked by bullying and harassment at the hands of administrators, teachers and students. The violence ranges from sexual to physical, from verbal to emotional, and may be as overt as purposeful gender and sexual assault or as insidious as homophobic joking and taunting of students, ignoring verbal and physical harassment when it is witnessed (García 2009, p. 523; Pascoe 2007, pp. 96, 114).

In hopes of creating more open and tolerant spaces for LGBT/Q sexuality and lives, many schools are adopting “safe space” policies and establishing gay-straight alliances. Such spaces simultaneously stand inside and outside the school—claiming meeting space, featured on bulletin boards and websites, touted as signs of school communities’ tolerance, even as they also critique school practices and policies and point to the violence and homophobia often characterizing normative school cultures (see for example dePalma and Atkinson 2006; Elia and Eliason 2010; Mayo 2013). Education scholars remind readers that, while schools can be difficult places for LGBT/Q students and teachers, this is only part of the story of what it means to be queer in schools. Even as LGBT/Q students, teachers, and families deserve to live free of harassment and discrimination in schools, they also live ordinary lives (Fields et al. 2014; Marshall 2010; Talburt 2004). Research rarely represents the quotidian aspects of teaching and learning as an LGBT/Q person in school (Gilbert 2014; Talburt 2004). Instead, dramatizing notions of young people’s sexuality are left to prevail.

4 Sexual Speech, Knowledge, and Innocence

A claim to sexuality’s ordinary place in young people’s lives is, ironically, controversial. The debate between abstinence-only and comprehensive sexuality education was forever caught within the narrow terms of the culture wars; within these terms, a gradual acceptance of comprehensive sexuality education represented a victory for progressive politics. While research consistently demonstrates that comprehensive sexuality education promotes sexual well-being and offers healthier lessons about gender, sexuality, and decision making (Kirby 2008; Kirby and Laris 2009; Santelli et al. 2006a and 2006b), Nancy Lesko (2010) reminds us to think beyond the dichotomy between abstinence-only and comprehensive curricula and their shared equation of sexuality with danger and education with intervention (see also Fields 2008).

Depravity narratives pervade U.S. debates about sex and sexuality education and reflect the conflation of, on the one hand, sexual behavior and sexual risk and, on the other, education and intervention. Abstinence-only advocates offer stories about teachers who seduce, corrupt, or otherwise sexually endanger their students. In these narratives, sexual speech becomes tantamount to sexual activity and educators who participate in sexual speech leave themselves vulnerable to charges of inappropriate intervention. Even classroom talk of normative heterosexuality can constitute an assault in which adults “persuade, incite, or otherwise arouse youth to later engage in the very acts spoken about” (Irvine 2000, p. 63) and talk about homosexuality becomes an inherently predatory act in which adults initiate children or youth into a host of sexual perversions, including same-sex behaviors and desires (Irvine 2000, 2002; Levine 2002). In these narratives, talking with children and youth about sex is a reckless act, comparable to engaging in sexual activity with children and youth. According to this logic, “[s]exual speech … provokes and stimulates. It transforms the so-called natural modesty of children into inflamed desires that may be outside the child’s control and thus prompt sexual activity” (Irvine 2000, p. 62; see also Heins 2007; Irvine 2002). This framing renders sexuality education a suspect task: a violation of children and youth’s sexual innocence and yet another assault on the embattled and idealized child-victim.

This perceived threat mobilized some conservative parents to resist sexuality education in their children’s schools; other parents, along with policy makers and educators, are reluctant to publicly endorse sexuality education that promotes anything other than sexual abstinence, normative family structures, and conventional gender expression (Irvine 2002). In this climate, the conflation of sexual speech and sexual acts and the companion panic surrounding sexuality education and the threat of sexual molestation help to naturalize conventional sexual hierarchies in the name of protecting youth. Strategies for mitigating these apparent risks might include, for example, employing only highly trained sexuality educators or instituting peer education programs in which young people, not adults, deliver the instruction. Ultimately, however, protecting youth comes to mean protecting them from sexuality education.

The conflation of sexual speech and acts shapes not only public debate but also teaching and learning in the classroom. Looming charges of depravity leave all sexuality education advocates, policy makers, and instructors in a nearly impossible situation: how can they convince parents and community members that their course of instruction does not put young people at risk, let alone that their instruction might ease the risks that young people face? In response, participants in sexuality education debates and policy-making acknowledge that the curriculum they advocate—whether abstinence-only, abstinence-based, or comprehensive—necessarily includes talk of sex; however, they argue, that speech is factually sound and medically accurate and thus the logical and rational choice for any adult committed to promoting the health of children and youth (Fields 2008; Fine 1988; Fine and McClelland 2006). To stave off charges that sexuality education is a depraved activity, teachers, parents, and advocates must invoke sexuality education’s potential to save vulnerable children and youth.

Depravity narratives and suspicion of sexuality educators rest on a historically available discourse about the corruptible child; they also help to imagine and constitute a world in which the threat of sexual molestation looms everywhere, every teacher is potentially a pedophile, and learning happens when “the omnipotent, all-controlling adult” meets “the powerless, passive child” (Angelides 2004, p. 160). Sexuality education, resting as it does on talking with youth about sexuality, threatens to become a crime in which “any teacher is a suspect” (Irvine 2000, p. 70). In this political climate, those who advance a vision of sexuality as dangerous and corrupting gain political and social legitimacy. Suspicion and distrust await those who might otherwise resist this normative vision of sexuality and youth by advancing an expansive and nuanced understanding of sexuality and youth.

5 The Promise of Rationality

Against the charge that their version of sexuality education injures children and youth , advocates of comprehensive sexuality education turn to the safety of science. In a series of single- and co-authored articles, John Santelli (2006) has been particularly active in the call for greater attention from citizens, policymakers, and advocates to the science surrounding sexuality education. Ideological positions, like those we have detailed in this chapter, have driven policymaking and practice; science should drive decision making instead. As Santelli and others argue, science points repeatedly to the failure of abstinence-only education to promote sexual health and wellbeing (DeLamater 2007; Santelli et al. 2006a; Schalet et al. 2014)

Consistently, evaluation and social science research indicates that comprehensive sexuality and STI/HIV education has the capacity to decrease rates of unwanted pregnancy, disease and infection and to promote overall sexual health and well-being (Kirby and Laris 2009). Programs that emphasize abstinence at the expense of information about, for example, pregnancy prevention, safer sex, and sexual communication fail to have a positive impact on young people’s sexual well-being (Kirby 2008), and they may even threaten human rights (DeLamater 2007; Santelli et al. 2006a). On the other hand, programs that offer comprehensive instruction more effectively delay young people’s initiation of consensual sexual behavior and reduce their number of sexual partners (Kirby and Laris 2009).

Biomedical approaches to sexual health and well-being are not enough (Rotheram-Borus et al. 2009). Researchers with the UK project, Sexual Health And Relationships—Safe, Happy And Responsible (SHARE) have launched a series of articles that argue sexuality education curricula “must be carefully embedded in lessons [that] are informed by an awareness of classroom culture, and the needs and skills of teachers” (Wight and Abraham 2000, p. 25; see also Buston et al. 2002). Even with such sensitivity to the context of teaching and learning, a well-designed, theoretically-informed curricula may improve the quality of young people’s sexual and emotional lives but have little impact on sexual behaviors, included unprotected sex, contraceptive use, teen pregnancies, or abortions (Henderson et al. 2007; Wight et al. 2002).

Others have expressed concern that even favorably evaluated curricula and programs fail to address issues of pleasure, agency, and ethics—concerns that fill the pages of social science publications on sexuality education (McClelland and Fine 2008). McClelland and Fine (2008) also remind readers that the research science on sexuality education is often “embedded” in existing public policy. And, as Schalet et al. note, “The current policy does not require programs to be engaged with the breadth of current scientific thinking about adolescents and their sexual health” (2014, p. 1605).

The turn to science to justify progressive educational programs is an important, and familiar, political strategy—with science on its side, comprehensive sexuality education seems poised to prevail in the waning days of the culture wars. The rise of language of “evidence-based” curricula and “outcomes” in sexuality education marks this change. What is lost in this political move is an attention to the intimate scenes of teaching and learning that most sexuality education involves. Education scholars have long cast suspicion on the easy relation between knowledge and behavior and cautioned us not to conflate curriculum with learning (Gilbert 2014). For instance, in a study of controversies surrounding the introduction of a gay-positive curriculum in New York City schools, Cris Mayo (2007) insists that the homophobic backlash to the rainbow curriculum has the potential to open up new conversations about LGBT/Q life in schools. Knowledge in this case goes astray and students learn an unexpected lesson about tolerance and love. Abstinence-only and comprehensive sexuality education too often rely on a linear understanding of education: provide students the requisite knowledge so they will adopt the behaviors—for example, sexual abstinence or contraceptive use—that teachers advocate (Lesko 2010). Comprehensive sexuality education and abstinence-only education build on each other and on a shared cultural moment and, as such, “touch in many ways” (Lesko 2010, p. 290). In prevailing comprehensive models of sexuality education, knowledge is presumed to be “positive and accurate,” part of a broad definition of freedom as the product of scientific knowledge and empowerment. Abstinence-only models similarly indulge in this “pan-optimism” (2010, p. 290), in which knowledge produces desired outcomes—discouraging sexual behavior and promoting compliance with gender and sexual norms.

Such optimism is possible only with a notion of knowledge as stable—a notion that empirical research repeatedly indicates is at odds with meaningful sexuality education that would embrace a subjective, relational and holistic view of sexuality itself. No matter whether activists and movements advance abstinence-only or comprehensive curricula, the instruction they advocate promotes or defends against change in cultural ideas about sexuality as evident in thinking about gender, sexual expression and identity, or family (Bay-Cheng 2013; Irvine 2002; Levine 2002; Stein 2006). Despite abstinence-only education’s persistent failure to convince youth to remain abstinent or to stem disease and unwanted pregnancies among youth (Kirby 2008), the tenet of sexual abstinence has since the end of the twentieth century asserted “a kind of natural cultural authority, in schools and out” (Fine and McClelland 2006, p. 299). Comprehensive sexuality education advocates who might have otherwise promoted more liberal, progressive, or even radical curriculum and pedagogy have been increasingly accountable to this cultural authority. Young people abstaining from sexual behaviors and exploration has become more desirable than their examining and experiencing sexuality’s complexities (Gilbert 2014).

A recourse to science and the discourse of rationality may be an effective political tool and the ground of sound decision making. They are also discursive tools. Science promises to tame the unruliness of sexuality. In their ethnographic studies, both Kendall (2012) and Fields (2008) found this framing affected the ways teachers could engage with sexual information in their classrooms. In a school where controversy about sexual speech led to harassment and censure of some sex educators, teachers—and particularly female teachers—adopted lessons that focused on the biological aspects of puberty and reproduction . This sort of “no nonsense” adherence to science, which neutralizes personal opinion, protects teachers from charges of sexual provocation.

This confidence in the neutrality of science veils a theory of education. A stable, rational, and unambiguous relationship between knowledge and behavior is at the heart of sexuality education debates and practice and, in turn, sexuality education research. Sexuality education that couches itself in the promise of scientific rationality rests on a belief that knowledge replaces ignorance and that behavior change is an effect of rational persuasion. This pedagogical wish—that there could be a direct line between teaching and learning; curriculum and behavior—undergirds all sides of the sexuality education debates. Mainstream curricular positions continue to try to recapture an imagined and predictable relationship between knowledge and behavior: teach young people to abstain, and they will; compromise young people with knowledge of sexual behaviors and desires, and they will be endangered; and present information about risk, prevention, and responsible behavior, and you will promote healthy decision-making in youth.

There are, at least, two limitations to this approach. First, sexuality education risks being conflated with behavior modification. Across studies of sexuality education, researchers attempt to tie particular lessons, programs, policies, and activities to behavior change: delay of sexual intercourse, reductions in STIs and pregnancies, reduction in number of sexual partners, and shifts in attitudes towards LGBT/Q people. These “outcomes,” measurable with the logics of scientific rationality, have come to play a significant role in research funding, curriculum development and policy advocacy. And yet, rather than simply being an effect of sexuality education, these conventionally understood outcomes have come to define the purposes and aims of sexuality education. What if, instead of orienting itself around behavioral and attitudinal change, sexuality education focused on the development of thoughtfulness, interpretive practices, or analyses of social inequalities? HIV education might include an exploration of gender scripts and stereotypes (Díaz 1998; Laub et al. 1999), assert a critical understanding of pleasure’s role in decisions about safe and unsafe sex (Naisteter and Sitron 2010), and invite children and youth into conversations about sexuality and loss (Silin 1995).

Second, if sexuality education were to make thoughtfulness a desired outcome—if we connected sexuality to a more holistic notion of a development of a sense of personhood and relationality—sexuality education might be located somewhere besides health and physical education. Many researchers, frustrated by the limitations inherent in legitimized school-based sexuality education programs (such as their duration, the curricular demands, and teacher anxiety over controversy), argue that sex education may be productively folded into other subject matter areas. For example, Rogow and Haberland (2005) argue that social studies classrooms offer ideal sites for critical sexuality education. Because social studies courses are interdisciplinary, they can incorporate lessons on many aspects of sexuality often left untackled in official sex education courses: social construction of gender differences and discrimination, differential access to sexual and reproductive choice, rape and other aspects of sexuality that are “fundamentally social matters” (p. 338). Similarly, Brian Casemore et al. suggest that sex education could adopt the interpretive practices of reading literature where what is at stake is not just “the facts” about sexuality but how our engagements with knowledge are shaped by our desires (2011; see also Casemore 2010; Sandlos 2011). Alyssa Niccolini notices that a missing discourse of female desire (Fine 1988) in an “old fashioned” high school sexuality education lead some young racialized women to engage with black lesbian erotica in “free reading” sessions in English class. Niccolini defends the texts as allowing young women to “imagine themselves as sexual beings capable of pleasure and cautions about danger without carrying the undue burden of social, medical and reproductive consequences” (2013, p. 3). In a similar vein, Catherine Ashcraft (2012) explores critical literacy education as a site of teaching and learning about sexuality. In these versions of sexuality education, danger is not just a risk to be avoided either by banning talk about sex, neutralizing it through discourses of science, or modifying young people’s behaviors; instead, the dangerousness of sexuality becomes an occasion for thinking.

At stake in these re-imaginings of sexuality education is the importance of what Michelle Fine and Sara McClelland (2006) call “thick desire.” A theory of thick desire does not collapse sexuality into danger and instead understands that “young people are entitled to a broad range of desires for meaningful intellectual, political, and social engagement, the possibility of financial independence, sexual and reproductive freedom, protection from racialized and sexualized violence, and a way to imagine living in the future tense” (p. 300). In this theory, the danger of sexuality comes largely from trying to exercise sexual agency in an unjust world. To make sexuality less risky means addressing the pervasive social inequalities that structure young people’s relationships and protecting young people’s rights to an education, self-expression, and healthy futures (Biegel 2010; Levesque 2000; Mayo 2013). And a sexuality education that looks beyond notions of risk toward thick desire might also support a more ambitious vision of education as responsible to a sense of secular ethics, citizenship, and personhood.

6 The Ambiguity of Risk

Articulating a vision of education that promotes well-being through a more expansive and less instrumentalist approach to risk, sexuality, and education involves both a rethinking of young people’s sexuality as comprising more than risk and an acknowledgement that many of the risks young people face reflect adult-made social conditions (Schaffner 2005). Jessica Fields and Deborah Tolman redefine risk

as a necessary part of life, as something that sometimes turns out well, as something that people sometimes willingly take on in order to push forward and grow[, and] as a function not of individual decision making but instead as a function of social conditions that put some young people at much greater risk of violence and exploitation than others (2006, p. 72).

We must, as Steven Angelides (2004) insists, distinguish risk from a sense of inevitable danger and couple risk with the possibility of pleasure. By linking risk with a sense of pleasure and insisting that the equation of youth with “riskiness” is itself dangerous, some researchers have begun to make a claim for the generative capacities of risk. Risk, in these formulations, is marked by ambivalence and ambiguity. It is not an objective assessment of a situation but an interpretation.

And yet, there are those who worry that this ambiguity threatens to undermine young people’s well-being. Without a definition of what it means to abstain, for instance, adolescents appear to be at risk of stumbling into a world characterized by the dangers of pregnancy and sexual behavior (see, for example, Sawyer et al. 2007). According to this instrumental argument, if “misconceptions and ambiguities” about abstinence are allowed to stand (Goodson et al. 2003, p. 91), educators and researchers will be unable to offer effective sexuality education, evaluate sexuality education programs, and equip young people to recognize when they are being sexually active and when their behaviors constitute a sexual risk (Haglund 2003). In response, many social science researchers, like policy makers, have sought an appropriate, clear definition that would help “provide adolescents with the information and decision-making skills to assess and maintain well-being” (Ott et al. 2006, p. 197).

An alternative lies in the work of researchers who, rather than positing these “highly personalized and often contradictory” definitions as problems to stamp out, approach the ambiguity of terms like “abstinence” and “sexuality” as problems to engage, as conditions of learning and of sexual life. Young people’s lack of clarity about abstinence and virginity reflects a broader lack of consensus in our society (Bersamin et al. 2007). And, like the category “abstinence,” what counts as “sexual intercourse” is not immune from ambiguity and uncertainty. In the Toronto Teen Survey, a large-scale survey of young people’s experiences of sexuality, 4 % of respondents reported being unsure whether they had had sexual intercourse. Among that group, 21 % had reported having vaginal intercourse, 28 % reported having oral sex and 9 % reported having anal sex (Flicker et al. 2010). Resistance to clear-cut definitions suggests that young people’s experiences of sexuality and of learning about sexuality exceed the normative cultural messages about risk, responsibility, and disease that characterize most abstinence-only and comprehensive sexuality education . As Jen Gilbert (2010) argues, advocates of comprehensive sex education have tried to evacuate sexuality of ambiguity by appealing to the language of health:

In the effort to stave off the incursions of abstinence into sex education, we have, in comprehensive sex education, made sex a problem of and for ‘health.’ Here, ‘health’ stands in for the adhesive and pro-social qualities of sexuality. ‘Healthy sexuality,’ ‘healthy relationships,’ ‘healthy body image,’ ‘healthy self-esteem:’ youth drown in admonitions that they should feel positive about any and all aspects of their bodies, selves, and identities. In comprehensive sex education, a proper, ‘healthy’ sexuality leads to relationships, intimacy, maturity, and pleasure (p. 233).

Such an approach to education casts sexual decision making as wholly rational and denies “affect as a central part of what knowledge does” (Lesko 2010, p. 282). The affective experiences of learning about sexuality exceed the bounds of rational and predictable knowledge—we do not always make healthy choices, even as adults. This excess animates young people’s experiences of sexuality and persists in classroom practice. It also pervades local and national sexuality education debates. Consistently, sexuality education evokes a range of fraught social concerns about, for example, which family formations communities will accept and celebrate in their midst; how best to respond to increasing numbers of—and tolerance of—LGBT/Q youth; the relative responsibility of families and schools to provide for young people’s sexual well-being and moral character; and how educators, families, service providers, and other community members will respond to the incidence and risk of teen pregnancies and STIs.

Ambiguity and ambivalence in sexuality education policy and practice represent a call to move beyond the polarized debate between abstinence-only and comprehensive sexuality education and allow instead for an expansive approach to learning and knowing that opens with and sustains questions. Indeed, in this chapter we argue for teaching and learning in which “not knowing and feeling confused [might become] the basis of learning about sexuality” and not something to be corrected (Gilbert 2010, p. 5). In this vision of sexuality education, the ambivalence, pleasure, worry, and other sexual experiences and associations that are currently interpreted as intruding upon effective teaching, learning, and policy would be recognized and contended with as the cultural conditions in which communities debate sexuality education policy and practice and, ultimately, the stuff of sexuality education itself.