We should be outraged by sexuality education’s colonialist connections. As a researcher and trainer based in the UK, I see how deeply blatant colonialist influences run in the field of sex education. The British empire was obsessed with the sexualities of their subjects and imagined their societies to be exotic licentious places where upper class British men could live out illicit fantasies. Yet, at the same time, these societies were deemed to be wells of immorality that needed Victorian moral education. These dual imaginaries were used to justify colonialism itself as a force to civilize non-western bodies and sexualities, and remain as ideas which echo in more contemporary discourses around controlling population and HIV.

Another strand of colonialism is present in the way that sexual health knowledge builds on unethical medical research carried out on racialized people. One notable example is of studying untreated syphilis among black men in the United States into the 1970s without providing them treatment even when this became widely available. The eugenics movement’s thinking that working class, non-white and disabled people should not reproduce has influenced teaching on pregnancy prevention. And even in the last few years, the British government has hijacked LGBT+ sex education in an Islamophobic campaign which portrays Muslims as both misogynist and homophobic.

We should be outraged, but maybe not surprised at sexuality education’s colonialist connections. Sexuality and power are integrally connected at both individual and systems levels. Putin’s portrayal of his invasion of Ukraine as a war to reinstate traditional family values in the face of western LGBT rights and feminist movements is just one example of geopolitical deployment of sex and gender. Education systems are also sites of contestation. They can seek to empower young people or aim to inculcate the next generation into the moral and racial order of the nation.

This is particularly true in sex education, which is deeply enmeshed in broad dynamics of power and institutional norms. Although the evidence is clear that teaching about power and pleasure does more for young people’s health than teaching about abstinence, struggles continue over whether sex education should be about rights, health, power, pleasure, or moralism and nationalism. Indeed, sex education often combines contradictory and co-opted content. In Zimbabwe, the life skills curriculum combines child rights, gender equality, abstinence promotion, and patriotism. In the UK, sex education and LGBT inclusion are framed as “British values.”

While we might not be surprised at the persistence of colonialism in sex education, what is   surprising is that so little of this is mentioned in curricula—especially when ‘critical thinking’ is often included among its goals. When sexuality education addresses power, it usually teaches children to question inequalities between girls and boys, women and men, and sometimes also between heterosexual cisgender people and people who are LGBTQ+.* This is a good start. But what’s left out are the colonial histories and contemporaneities that have generated so much sexual and reproductive ill-health, instated white heteronormative sexualities as the norm, and pathologized anyone who deviated from them. The continuing global inequalities which affect sexual health and rights in the majority world, such as Africa’s subsidizing of minority world health systems by training nurses who migrate, and big pharma’s patenting of HIV drugs putting profit before health, are also missing from the discussion. And sex education rarely teaches about the intersections of gender inequality and oppression with racism and exploitation of Indigenous people. Children are taught to make ‘good’ choices to preserve their health without addressing the inequalities which constrain those choices.

How to Decolonise Sex Education?

How can sexuality educators respond to the historical and contemporary colonialism in our sector? As an English mother tongue white person born in the global north, I benefit from a range of deep privileges and thus have a particular responsibility to contribute to efforts to decolonise my sector, without co-opting these efforts. I don’t have the answers, but I find several emerging initiatives and ideas which start to address the issues. 

Resources and Reparation: In recognition of the damage done to the bodies and sexualities of peoples of the majority world by minority world states and corporations, resources need to be shifted to benefit majority world populations. What does this mean for sex education? A start could be more development aid from north to south for sexual health and rights and education, reversing the cuts in aid. Resources should support initiatives led by marginalised people themselves, such as Teenergizer—a network of young people living with HIV in Ukraine and other parts of central and eastern Europe.

We must also decolonize the development sector.  And while development aid can be a start, it is far from enough. Reparations that are neither aid nor charity should be negotiated internationally.

Changing Sexuality Education Content: Critical thinking must include examination of colonialism’s connections with sexuality. University of South Africa researcher Lindokuhle Ubisi has made broad recommendations on how to integrate de/coloniality, disability, and sexuality into anti-oppressive education. University of California, Santa Cruz professor Gomez Parra’s analysis of both the European colonial legacy, and how U.S. discourse and policies around immigration underscores how they have stigmatised racialized people’s sexualities as dangerous, and characterized reproduction as a strategy to access welfare. She suggests her analysis can be used as a ‘curriculum blueprint’.

Content within the sector needs to speak to the diversities of the audiences. Trauma informed sex education gives hugely important recognition to the likelihood that any classroom or audience will include people who have experienced trauma. This needs to be understood to go beyond the trauma of sexual and gender-based violence to include racist and colonialist violence. Canadian educator Lydia Collins makes a call:

“Let’s talk about how war impacts power dynamics between the occupier and the occupied, which ultimately dismisses one’s ability to consent. Or how Black kids are bombarded with hypersexualization and adultification, having their youth constantly disrupted by social perspectives of them being sexual objects rather than children. Or how our racial and cultural identities can make our relationship to sexual and gender-based violence complex. Or how anti-Blackness often impedes our ability to come forward with our stories out of fear.”

Changing who decides content: Who decides sexuality education content and what it includes are connected issues. There needs to be a shift from building and recognizing western to non-western expertise, for example South Africa’s contribution to transnational LGBTI education work. Non-western framings need to be deployed, without falling into the traps of romanticizing “traditional knowledge,” or simplistic nationalist opposition to an imagined western debauchery (a la Putin). The ‘Agents of Ishq’ sex education site does this brilliantly. When I interviewed Creator Paromita Vorha in 2020, she explained: ‘We mine erotic traditions of India and re-purpose them for contemporary life. How do we have a contextual discussion which does not fall into the hands of nationalists? Through art which can deal with the nuances.’

A power shift is also needed from teacher to student, from top-down teaching to supporting people to learn from their own experiences. Sexuality education demands this pedagogy because it’s an action-oriented subject that starts with peoples’ own bodies.

This came home to me while presenting at the 7^th Chinese Sexuality Research Academic meeting, when I was challenged by the sex-life coach Yang Chun, who argued that “sex education is the kind of thing you just have to learn from your own experience; it’s not something that schools can teach.”  How, I wondered, can educators support people to learn from their own experiences before they have a first experience of sex, by which time it could be useful to understand condoms, consent, communication, feelings and power? UK Sex educator Justin Hancock has come up with a handshake exercise that could give people an experience of negotiating a physical interaction that they might use later in more sexual situations.

Challenging the Legacy

Challenging our colonial legacies is a huge task. It is even more difficult in the currently polarized world where sexuality education is under attack from right wing populism and anti-gender movements. But it’s a necessary and urgent task.

At times, we are accused of wielding colonial power and bringing western values to undermine non-western nations and communities. This must never be true. We must decolonize sex education to redress the violence of the past, and to offer people what they actually need to know. In this way, our work will better withstand accusations of western imposition. A first step could be sexuality educators recognizing the colonial dimensions of our sector and realising that this needs to be part of our own learning as well as our teaching.