Sex Education

Youth Activism and Relationship, Sex and Sexuality Education

This special issue of Sex Education journal focuses on youth activism in relation to relationships, sex, and sexuality education. We welcome contributions that explore youth and student-led, youth-informed, and intergenerational activism in formal and informal contexts. We adopt a broad understanding of activism and welcome contributions where young people’s efforts to influence relationships, sex and sexuality education take creative and multifaceted forms, both within and beyond schools, in grassroots movements, peer groups, faith-based organization's, digital spaces, and transnational networks.

Activist efforts to expand or restrict sexuality education have been explored in broader scholarship on the subject. However, there have been few opportunities to bring these accounts together in contexts that compare and contrast activist perspectives, approaches, and participants. While youth voices are frequently invoked in policy and practice, they are often instrumentalised or depoliticised in ways that do not allow young people to influence the sex education they receive. Although young people are key stakeholders in most sex and sexuality education endeavours, their efforts to influence the content and methods of relationship and sexuality education often go unrecognised. This is especially true of youth activism about sex and sexuality education that takes place beyond formal school curricula and in policy settings such as community and faith-based organisations or online networks. 

This special issue of Sex Education journal responds to this gap by centring youth activism as a critical site for rethinking what relationships, sex and sexuality education is and what it could be. Although young people hold distinctive perspectives informed by their age and status as students, peer educators, workers and young adults, other components of their identities and social locations, such as sexual orientation, ability, class, religion, gender, race, geographical location, and local political contexts, coalesce to create varied perceptions and experiences of what relationships, sex and sexuality education are and could be about.

Drawing on critical disability, queer, feminist, decolonial, and youth studies perspectives, we invite contributions that examine how young people across diverse contexts both contest and reinforce dominant discourses of sexuality education, articulating their unique perspectives as youth stakeholders, and organising to influence how relationships, sex and sexuality education are imagined and practised.