Sex Education

The Entangled Histories of Violence and Sex Education

Comprehensive sexuality and relationships education is often cast as progressive, inclusive, and a balm against violence (see for example Castillo et al. 2020, Bali et al. 2025, Grossi et al. 2025, Newton et al. 2025, Vrankovich et al. 2025). While contemporary debates about sexuality and relationships education, particularly in schools, pit liberal parents and advocates against right wing activists, the history of sexuality education is marked by a deep and contradictory intimacy between the education of bodies, genders, and sexualities and practices of violence.  This special issue of Sex Education focuses on these entanglements, inviting contributions that examine the relationship between histories and historiographies of sexuality education and practices of violence. This includes work that explores how histories of systemic violence such as settler and franchise colonialism, slavery, fascism, state socialism/communism, (military) dictatorship, authoritarianism and other forms of political and social violence intersect with sexuality education, which can be conceived in its broadest terms to include knowledge and pedagogies pertaining to sex, gender and sexuality and reproduction.

Sexuality education aimed at promoting health, hygiene, morality, and responsibility have never been merely emancipatory projects. Rather, they have also functioned as key sites of biopolitical and necropolitical regulation, governing life, vitality, and the “living‐dead” at the population level and with respect to individual bodies (Foucault 2008, Mbembe 2019). Across historical and geopolitical contexts, sexuality education has, in many cases, been grounded in and shaped by cisheteronormative, ableist, antisemitic, racialised, classed, caste-based and gendered discourses and practices that remain largely under-researched. Conversely, in some settings, sexuality education has aimed to address longstanding structures and modes of violence and oppression, but has been met with resistance because it was seen to threaten the social and moral order at the time. Moreover, although at times sexuality education was intended to resist or oppose structures or practices of violence, it simultaneously (re)produced other forms of exclusion.

Contributions are welcome that engage with these contradictions and conceive of sexuality education in broad and varied ways across formal, non-formal, and informal settings, including school-based interventions, the programmes and efforts of NGOs, public health and medical initiatives, teacher education, professional training, museum exhibitions and collections, literature, curricula, media, and social movements.

The diverse work we aim to bring together in this special issue of the journal seeks to contribute to sexuality education research by historicising discussion and debates about sexuality education and its relationship to histories of violence. The issue’s historical focus aims to challenge the presentism of the field and invites close critical consideration of how divergent violent practices in ‘the past’ have shaped ideas about bodies, subjectivities, desire, gender, and sexuality in the present. It also invites reflection on how some of the discourses identified by scholars analysing contemporary sexuality education practices (e.g. individualism, risk, personal responsibility) have much longer, and in some cases quite sinister, histories. Deepening our understanding of the ambivalent and violent past may help to rethink how contemporary sexuality education can be taught without disavowing these histories and their ongoing presence, while at the same time generating an understanding of continuities and differences in relation to contemporary authoritarian and fascist sexual politics.

Aligned with Sex Education’s commitment to publishing high-quality research across diverse educational, community, and cultural contexts, this special issue welcomes contributions from multiple disciplines, including education, sociology, youth studies, history, public health, cultural studies, and media studies.

We welcome innovative empirical, conceptual, and methodological submissions from a wide range of geographical, cultural, and policy contexts, particularly contributions engaging with trans*, queer-feminist, Indigenous, postcolonial, decolonial, Black feminist, disability studies, and other critical epistemologies.

We especially encourage submissions from outside the Global North, including Africa, Asia, and South America.

Possible topics to address include:

• Social hygiene movements, venereal disease control, and campaigns against sex work within regimes of gender, racialisation and nationalism
• Campaigns against sexuality education, young people’s access to sexual and reproductive health information
• State-sponsored or institutionalised sterilisation campaigns, fertility politics, family planning programmes and colonial and/or eugenics projects
• The role of the Church and missionary education in enforcing patriarchy and heterosexuality, including conversion therapies
• Sexuality education in contexts of military dictatorships and authoritarian regimes, including reproductive control and gendered state violence
• Sexuality education entangled with fascism, including the persecution and criminalisation of deviant sexualities, erotic eugenics, and eugenic fertility politics
• Sexuality education under colonial and slavery regimes, including sexual violence, racialised eroticisation, reproductive exploitation and the destruction of kinship structures
• Gender, sexuality and sex education as a colonial project in Residential Schools, Indian Boarding Schools, and Mission Schools
• Histories of sexual violence and violence against homosexual trans* and gender nonconforming people within or enabled by educational and welfare institutions

References

Bali, M., R. Meiksin, and K. Sell. 2025. „Comprehensive sexuality education addressing gender and power: a systematic review of intervention effects.” Sex Education 1–22. https://doi.org/10.1080/14681811.2025.2559828

Castillo, J., I. Derluyn, E. Jerves, and M. Valcke. 2020. “Perspectives of Ecuadorean teachers and students on the importance of addressing comprehensive sexuality education.” Sex Education 20(2): 202–216. https://doi.org/10.1080/14681811.2019.1640112

Foucault, M. 2008. The birth of biopolitics. Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978–1979. New York, NY: Picador.

Grossi, A. M., V. Bruno, V. Giuliano, S. Nardini, and D. Santini. 2025. A”dolescence and gender-based violence: comprehensive sexuality education to the rescue in Italian high schools.” Sex Education 1–14. https://doi.org/10.1080/14681811.2025.2582817

Mbembe, A. 2019. Necropolitics. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Newton, J. D. A., W. K. Halford, and F. K. Barlow. 2025. “Perceived usefulness of sex and relationship education sources among sexual minority men.” Sex Education 25(6): 919–936. https://doi.org/10.1080/14681811.2024.2407622

Vrankovich, S., G. Hamilton, and A. Powell. 2025. “Young adult perspectives on sexuality education in Australia: implications for sexual violence primary prevention.” Sex Education 25(5): 615–630. https://doi.org/10.1080/14681811.2024.2367216