Staying Safe
Comprehensive sexuality education aims to equip children and young people with knowledge, skills, and values necessary for healthy sexual development and respectful relationships, emphasizing inclusion, empathy, and autonomy. As young people increasingly engage with digital spaces for information on sexuality, educators must navigate the balance between leveraging the benefits of digital platforms while equipping them with critical skills to assess and navigate potentially harmful content, including pornography.
According to UNESCO, comprehensive sexuality education is a curriculum-based process of teaching and learning about the cognitive, emotional, physical, and social dimensions of human sexuality. Its goal is to provide children and young people with knowledge, skills, attitudes, and values that empower them to uphold their health, well-being, and dignity, cultivate respectful social and sexual relationships, consider the impact of their choices on their own and others’ well-being, and safeguard their rights throughout their lives.
Comprehensive sexuality education adopts a positive approach to addressing sexuality, emphasising values such as respect, inclusion, non-discrimination, equality, empathy, responsibility, and reciprocity. It reinforces healthy and positive perspectives regarding bodies, puberty, relationships, sexual matters, and family life.
By adopting a learner-centred approach, comprehensive sexuality education is customised to suit the learner’s age and developmental level. Younger students are introduced to fundamental concepts like family, respect, and kindness, while older learners engage with more intricate topics such as gender-based violence, sexual consent, HIV testing, and pregnancy.
When effectively provided alongside access to essential sexual and reproductive health services, comprehensive sexuality education equips young individuals to make informed choices regarding relationships and sexuality while guiding them in navigating life’s complexities. It also serves to protect children from abuse by educating them about their bodies. Conversely, the absence of high-quality, age-appropriate education on sexuality and relationships may expose children and young people to harmful sexual behaviours and exploitation.
Evidence consistently endorses the value of comprehensive sexuality education and the effectiveness of approaches that address a wide definition of sexual health and well-being, while embracing positive, affirming, and inclusive attitudes toward human sexuality.
In summary, a holistic approach that covers diverse sexual health topics, progressively integrated throughout grades, fostered within supportive school environments and across subject areas, has the potential to promote an understanding of sexual diversity, prevent dating and intimate partner violence, nurture the development of healthy relationships, protect against child sexual abuse, enhance social and emotional learning, and boost media literacy.