Sex, relationships and HIV

A 2005 conference on the history of sex education14 concluded that the history of sex education is still relatively
unexplored. Sex, relationships and HIV education material and policy are culturally and historically contingent: in
other words, their content and focus are shifting rather than fi xed and are indicative of preoccupations that are
particular to time and place.
The UK provides a useful example of a country where the history of sex education is gradually being documented.15
Little attention appears to have been paid to the topic in the school setting prior to the Second World War. However,
the period following 1945 appears to have witnessed an increase in school sex education with a strong emphasis
on the prevention of syphilis and gonorrhoea. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, the focus appears to have been
on non-human reproduction. The location of sex education within biology allowed for a gradual shift in emphasis
to human reproduction. However, with biology perceived to be a more suitable subject for girls than boys, fewer
boys received sex education. By the 1970s, sex education was changing and beginning to provide more complete
accounts of human reproduction together with teaching about contraception and learning about relationships. The
infl uence of feminist thinking meant that, by the 1980s, at least some sex education curricula included consideration
of gender. Also, interest in participatory methods of teaching and learning meant that the notion of skills began
to feature in sex education. Nonetheless for the majority of young people, their experience of sex education continued
to be ‘too little, too late’. A number of issues coincided during the 1980s to make sex education a contested
political issue, not least of which was recognition of the importance of education about HIV and AIDS and disputes
about how this should be done in the classroom.
While the situation in the UK shares many similarities with the USA, the situation in the Netherlands – a much
closer neighbour – is quite different. In the Netherlands, sex education has not been politicised and this may, at
least in part, explain their more coherent and rational approach to the topic. It may also partly explain why their
teenage pregnancy rate is lower than that of either the UK or the USA.
Globally, since the late 1960s, the United Nations Populations Fund (UNFPA) has been a key player in promoting the
concept and practice of population education.16,17 By the 1980s, around 80 countries were implementing population
education programmes in schools. The main goals of population education were to promote the linkages between
population dynamics and development, to improve family welfare and to reduce adolescent pregnancy. The 1994
International Conference on Population and Development created a paradigm shift in terms of goals and a corresponding
move away from fertility reduction towards greater access to reproductive health services and family
planning in the context of human rights and women’s empowerment. This has since been refl ected in population
education, which has gone on to place greater emphasis on sex education, HIV prevention and the promotion of
gender equality and equity. In many countries, the HIV epidemic has justifi ed the introduction of sex education.
In Africa, some countries began with population education before shifting the focus towards family life and sex education.
For example, the Government of Uganda, with assistance from UNFPA and UNESCO, introduced population
education in the formal education system in 1988. Since then, the programme has shifted to address reproductive
health more explicitly, as well as HIV and AIDS. In the 1990s, Nigeria, with technical assistance from the Sexuality
Information and Education Council of the United States (SIECUS), developed and implemented a comprehensive
sexuality education curriculum. More recently, an electronic resource18 based on the Nigerian Family Life and HIV
and AIDS Education (FLHE) curriculum has been made available online.
Sex education has had a long history in Latin America and the Caribbean, developing from a biological approach in
the 1960s to STI prevention in the 1980s, to consolidation in the 1990s with formative objectives and competencies