Hard as it is for me to believe, it's been nearly twenty years since Independent School published its first special issue on the topic of sexuality education in October, 1981. It was a pioneering joint effort, co-edited by sexuality education researcher Peter Scales and Independent School's forward-thinking editor, Blair McElroy. It won national attention for the soundness of its message in an article dedicated to the issue in The New York Times.
A quick glance at the titles of four of the issue's articles – "Where Is Sexuality Education Today?"; "'Sex Ed' or 'Human Sexuality Education': What Makes the Difference?"; "Strengthening Family Life through Parent Sexuality Education"; "Evaluating Sexuality Education Programs" – reveals a sexuality education field in its infancy. The title of a fifth, "Family Life Curriculum for Junior High School," reminds us how "new" educational concepts (in this case, the middle school concept) can swiftly become "old" standbys.
Ironically, the timing of this publication missed by a hair one of the most significant sexual developments of the twentieth century – the advent of HIV/AIDS. Ten years later, the tenth-anniversary issue, published in early 1992, reflected both the sense of urgency and the preoccupation of the 1980s with HIV and other sexual health concerns, and the extent to which the sexuality field had been challenged to grow. In "Adolescence: A Risky Time," a comprehensive, research-based article that set the tone of the entire issue, psychologist William Fisher detailed the complicated physical, social, emotional, developmental, and cultural hurdles for young people as they attempt to make healthy sexual choices, particularly in an age of AIDS. Identifying multiple and complex roles for educational institutions in supporting sexual health among our youth, his message attempted to up the ante for all schools with a wide and compelling vision of what sexuality education can and should be. Other articles, "Teaching Sexuality Education in Independent Schools," about designing comprehensive, developmentally-based programming, and "Healthy Foundations," on approaches for educating the youngest of our children, called on schools to ensure that in the midst of the epidemic we not lose sight of young people's need to understand sexuality in essentially broad, positive, and life-affirming ways.
Significantly, Richard Friend's article in the same edition tackled the issue of heterosexism in schools, but couched in the context of other "isms" – racism, anti-Semitism, sexism, "handicapism" – reminding us of a time when homophobia was an issue still very much on the margins of society and school life, struggling for credibility. Just this week, nearly ten years later, I read in the Baltimore Sun that GLSEN, the Gay Lesbian Straight Education Network, founded by former independent school teacher Kevin Jennings, has taken on a formidable United States institution, the Boy Scouts of America, in a nationwide initiative to fight discrimination against gays. What a difference a decade makes.
Amazingly, just after we had made final editorial decisions regarding the Spring 1992 anniversary edition, another red-hot issue hit the proverbial fan. In late October 1991, the Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings doubled as a national in-service on the issue of sexual harassment in the workplace. Gender and gender issues captured the nation's attention as never before, and in response to the Thomas hearings and several key court decisions, schools rushed to implement or shore up sexual harassment policies and initiate all-school anti-harassment training. Meanwhile, Mary Pipher published her landmark book, Reviving Ophelia, and the consciousness of parents and educators everywhere was raised about the damaging intellectual, social, emotional, and sexual pressures on early adolescent girls in contemporary American culture. Next it was the "boys' turn," as the late 1990s witnessed a plethora of books on a parallel litany of problems which beset developing young boys.
As we embark on publication of the twentieth-anniversary edition, in Winter 2001, I won't even try to foretell what might be next, except to predict that it will be something totally unpredictable and that, true to form, it will happen within one year of this publication. So stay tuned!
What I can say with confidence is that several of the issues that commanded the attention of families and schools at the end of the 1990s will continue to dominate the cultural and educational landscape for some time to come. Hence, we have chosen to focus on these five aspects of sexuality education in this third anniversary issue.
Elinor Scully, a sexuality education consultant and soon-to-be asso-ciate director of the upper school at St. Stephen's and St. Agnes School (Virginia), has spent several years conducting research in classrooms about the ways in which high-school-aged boys come to understand, assimilate, and play out contemporary notions of masculinity. As a seasoned counselor and classroom teacher, her observations are important not only for teachers of sexuality and family-life education who deal directly with gender issues in their programs, but for all educators who wish to better understand developmental processes and school cultures.
On the heels of the Clinton/ Lewinsky scandal in 1998, Washington Post writer Laura Sessions Stepp published a front-page story detailing anecdotal reports of an apparent increase in the incidence of oral sex among middle-school students. The fact that the students involved were from upper middle- to upper-class families living in suburban Virginia sent shock waves through public and private schools in the Washington, D.C., area and elsewhere. (Predictably, the story received national and even international attention). Several other articles recounting similar observations have since appeared in The New York Times and elsewhere, sounding a national wake-up call if not a full-scale fire alarm about teens and sex. While some adults have blamed the problem directly on the high-profile presidential scandal, many educators and counselors contend that oral sex, and other premature sexual behaviors among early adolescents, is a symptom of much larger cultural and developmental pressures on youngsters today. (What we can probably attribute to the Clinton scandal is a greater openness and willingness across the country to notice and talk about previously hidden problems or taboo topics.) Whatever the causes of these trends, the hubbub created by these stories has for the first time significantly re-focused sexuality education on the actual topic of sex, as opposed to its mechanics and its potential outcomes. As parents and educators, it seems we are becoming less concerned with the quantitative aspects of our children's sexual lives (i.e., Who is doing "it" with whom, at what ages, how often, and with what consequences?) and more concerned with the qualitative: What is the "it" that they are doing, why, when, and in what context? Ultimately, that's a healthy shift. Laura Sessions Stepp continues this dialogue in her article, "How to Talk about Sex."
As everyone knows, the Internet has created an information explosion in our society, and that includes information about sexuality. Ironically, at the same time that school-based sex education has become narrower and narrower in focus (at least in the public sector), due to increasing emphasis on "abstinence-only" approaches, sexual information has never before been so readily available to children and adolescents of all ages. It's a "virtual" worst/best-case scenario – access to the most inappropriate and disgusting material possible, and the most informative and helpful material possible, all at the click of the same mouse. Susan Wilson, director of the New Jersey Network for Family Life Education at Rutgers University, writes about how we might use the Internet to meet the sexual education needs of young people in healthy, age-appropriate ways in "Learning about Sexuality from the Internet."
As mentioned, issues of heterosexism and homophobia have moved steadily from the margins to the mainstream, in society and in schools. Despite this change, gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgendered, and questioning youth (commonly referred to by the acronym GLBTQ) continue to experience widespread prejudice and mistreatment, which place them at greater risk for a host of physical and psychosocial problems. Schools are obliged to ameliorate some of these problems in at least two ways: first, by taking steps to eliminate verbal and physical harassment of GLBTQ youth, prevalent in so many school environments; and, second, by instituting educational programming to combat the myths and stereotypes that fuel fear, prejudice, and discrimination against sexual minorities. In an excerpt from my book, Sex and Sensibility, I write about why and how these topics can be addressed in school-based programs.
Finally, recent data published by the Kaiser Family Foundation indicate that the vast majority of American parents, students, and sexuality education teachers advocate a comprehensive school-based approach to the subject of sexuality. Yet, as noted above, and as documented in a recent study by the Alan Guttmacher Institute, the United States has experienced a steady and increasing trend during the last ten years toward narrow, abstinence-only approaches. There is no data to support the efficacy of the abstinence-only strategy, and, in fact, in several countries in Western Europe where comprehensive programs are in place, statistical measures of teenage sexual health are astonishingly higher than in the U.S. Barbara Huberman, director of education for the national organization Advocates for Youth, provides striking cross-cultural data in her article "Lessons from Abroad: European Approaches to Adolescent Sexuality."
Who knows the sexuality issues that will confront us and our children just over the horizon? The real challenge is not how well we can predict, but how well we can respond as a school community to whatever may come our way. Through it all, we must resist the temptation to slip into the "flavor of the month" approach to health education so common in our society. We might well ask: What ever happened to AIDS? What ever happened to sexual harassment? Will we stop worrying so much about girls now that we are "supposed" to be so worried about boys? Surely, these "old" problems have not gone away, but have we allowed our sense of concern and accountability to wane simply because something "new" has caught the media's attention, and, therefore, ours?
Ten years ago I posed the following eight questions aimed at helping us keep our focus on the big picture of healthy sexual development. I said then that we'd check in ten years later to see how we were doing. We hope this third special sexuality issue of Independent School will help you continue to keep your focus broad and deep; you might want to start by thinking about how often and how well your school has considered and answered these questions for your students since we last checked in. See you in 2011!
Deborah M. Roffman teaches sexuality education at The
Park School of Baltimore (Maryland) and is the author of the recent book,
Sex and Sensibility: The Thinking Parent's Guide to Talking Sense about
Sex (Perseus Books).
Copyright © Deborah Roffman, 2001. All rights reserved.