Comprehensive sex education is abolitionist work

I have always viewed my being a sex educator as more of a community role than a job. For me, this work has entailed creating social media content, writing for different publications, and engaging in public speaking on all topics sex and sexuality. 

In September of 2023, I hosted the first workshop for a cohort of students interested in sex education through my organisation The Youth Sexpert Program. Through this program, myself and other sex educators spent a semester digitally teaching a curriculum of not only sexual health education, but also communications skills. We talked about best practices for digital interactions, and modelled conversations about sex they might encounter with their peers. 

This was my first time working long-term with a group of young people and I absolutely loved it. I had spent so much of the early months planning the programme with my head down, thinking through overhead, our curriculum, our team, our finances. When I got into that first meeting all of that faded away. Not only were the young people in our cohort so intelligent, curious and funny, but the entire process also felt a bit like healing my own inner child. The students really seemed to enjoy our semester, and many of them continue to stay in touch and work on other projects with us. 

The idea behind The Youth Sexpert Program was that after having completed the programme, young people could take on the same role of sexual health expert that I have, only in their individual communities. In my ideal society, many of the systems currently in place would be replaced with various community roles we may take on, motivated by our empathy rather than wanting to fill our pockets. For example, unarmed mediators from each community could help settle disputes rather than police, and mental health counsellors would be a better fit to intervene in many instances that we call crime these days. It is this abolitionist imagining that led me to sex education in the first place. 

Sex education and capitalism

As an anti-capitalist with a background in organising, there was one realisation that made me pivot to teaching sex education: sex negativity, or the taboo nature of sex, is as pervasive as it is because it’s profitable. 

The purpose behind oppressing women, queer folks, BIPOC, fat and disabled folks is to increase financial profit, by ensuring hierarchy and creating standards and norms that require us to  spend incessantly to reach. Oppressed people – even more so those with intersecting marginalised identities – are told both subtly and explicitly that sex is not for them or about them. Their pleasure, their bodies, and the types of sex they may have are excluded from conventional sex education in lieu of conversations about condoms and STI horror stories. 

Many AFAB (assigned female at birth) people grow up only to discover their clitorises later in life. Many queer people come to understand that penetration is not the end-all-be-all of sex. Many BIPOC, fat, and disabled folks eventually realise that they too are deserving of pleasure, despite never seeing their experiences represented. 

They wonder why they were not taught these truths from the beginning. Why did they have to stumble across these fundamental realisations on their own, many of whom feeling the limitations of their miseducation well into adulthood? The answer is profit, and the solution is a future of sex education that puts people first. According to Josie, a former Youth Sexpert Program participant, “having sex ed makes it so young people understand their bodies, and the bodies of others, and that’s really important.” 

Perhaps this – the way power exists in our sexual interactions – is the most obvious way in which conventional (inadequate) sex education is tied to capitalism. We are also taught, though, that reproduction is the sole purpose of sex. This has in turn made our culture more comfortable speaking about reproduction as opposed to pleasure, sexual expression and orgasm.

This messaging pushes forward perceptions of sex that maintain economic hierarchies. In Michel Foucault’s The History of Sexuality, he highlights that gatekeeping information about sex, shrouding the topic in shame and secrecy and punishing open expressions of sexuality, helps maintain the value of the nuclear family. He directs us to consider how funds are transferred after death, most often inherited within the family from spouses to then children. 

In Good Sex Illustrated by Tony Duvert, “good sex”, or sex that is permissible, is state sanctioned. It may only happen within the context of marriage, and is intended to create more labour through reproduction. To the extent that “good sex” is pleasurable, it may only be so that married men can exert the power they have over their wives as a reward for their being cogs in the larger machine from the hours of nine to five. 

Perhaps others can relate to there being many moments in my upbringing where I questioned why things were the way they were. Why was I treated differently than my peers because of the colour of my skin? Why was I expected to act in specific ways because of my gender? Eventually, each of those questions led back to profit, to capitalism. “Why won’t anyone talk about sex?” can be answered just the same. 

Sex education and abolition

Although abolition is often linked to moving away from capitalism, it is rarely associated with sex education – but it should be. Abolitionism is about alternatives to carceral justice. Unlike right wing and centrist “tough on crime” advocates, or liberal calls for police and prison “reform”, abolitionists seek to get rid of police and prisons entirely. 

I have always believed that people misunderstand abolition to mean simply the demolition of systems in place. In truth abolition is equally about rebuilding or reinforcing community support systems that would make policing and prisons obsolete, including comprehensive sex education. 

The creation of new and needed community roles, like “youth sexpert”, is a prime example of the abolitionist practice of establishing new systems to keep us safe. As one of our youth sexperts, Coral shared “Sex-ed that includes and goes beyond accurate medical information empowers us to protect not only our sexual safety, but our interpersonal wellness and confidence, as well.”

Abolition and sexual harm

Often, the first caveat people mention when learning about abolitionism is sex offenders. Those who oppose abolition may use sex crimes as their strongest argument. 

This is understandable. Sex crimes, particularly instances where children are victimised, can feel like just too much harm to ever rehabilitate those who commit them. 

Abolition teaches us that people are not disposable, but what is to be done about those who continually threaten to make the most vulnerable members of our society unsafe? 

Sex education and sex positivity give us an answer here as well: the hope of prevention. 

Imagine a society where people with paedophilic (or hebephilic, ephebophilic) desires were able to identify these feelings and access mental health services before they acted upon them. Imagine a society where young people were given the language to communicate potentially dangerous or predatory instances to trustworthy adults in their lives. 

There are already many ways in which we mold our lives around the fear of childhood sexual assault. We blur our kids’ faces on our social media posts, we require extensive background checks for childcare workers. We will do just about anything except address the people who commit these acts before they are committed, which is also shockingly ineffective. 

Many people may be surprised to learn that the majority of adults who prey on children are situational offenders. There is no evidence of them having attraction to children before they were sexually violent, they are people in a young person’s life who saw an opportunity, someone they could easily manipulate, and took it. 

Focusing on “those bad people over there” ignores those in close proximity to children who situationally offend and the conditions that allow them to do so, which include but are not limited to stress, toxic masculinity, children as a marginalised and vulnerable class. Many are also shocked to learn that a sizeable portion of childhood sexual assault is committed by other children. This is a truth that makes it quite clear why comprehensive (and lifelong) sex education is so crucial. Young children should be taught about boundaries, consent, communication, their own anatomy and the value of privacy. 

These two lesser-known facts came up in our workshops on consent and justice in The Youth Sexpert Program. I was caught off guard when our students expressed interest in talking about these complex topics, but as they pointed out, that childhood sexual violence is something young people should probably be talking about more as they are the ones who can be victimised. They deserve the space to process that risk or their personal experiences, the language to depict it, and the understanding that surviving sexual violence should not be stigmatised. 

Real advocacy is revolutionary 

As American activist and educator Mariame Kaba points out in her book We Do This Til We Free Us, statistically speaking, very few survivors of sexual violence at any age seek justice through the carceral system. Sexual assault is believed to be the most underreported crime. This speaks to how actual survivors, not the theoretical ones people create to “prove” abolition won’t work, see their odds of winning a case, or how they envision what justice is as a whole. 

In our Youth Sexpert Program curriculum, there is designated time for an open discussion with students about all the different things justice can mean to different people. Rather than simply punishment, many survivors truthfully see justice as the hope that the harm they endured will not happen to someone else, and recognise that prison is not transformation. Prison is not even the accountability that would precede transformation, as the justice system actually disincentives confessing to one’s crimes. And truthfully, how can we claim to be advocates knowing full well the extent to which sexual assault happens in prisons? 

By shifting our focus from punitive measures to preventive and educational approaches, we open pathways to healing and empowerment. This reimagining of sex education, grounded in inclusivity and empathy, holds the promise of a future where all individuals, regardless of their background, can experience their sexuality safely and with dignity.