Join RHEA for Sex Education: A Critical Understanding, a panel that brings together scholars and practitioners to interrogate the theory behind sex education, and its connections to the realities of policy, classrooms, clinics, and communities.
In recent years, access to sex education has seen both advances and setbacks. This panel invites a constructive re-examination of the logics that shape the field of sex education. This includes the rights-based approaches centred on individual empowerment, public-health approaches emphasising risk reduction, and increasingly justice-oriented approaches.
We consider how these logics interact with structural conditions and social norms around sexuality, reproductive health, and access to care. Bringing theory into conversation with practice, we ask: How do these logics materialise in curricula and programme delivery? What is under pressure in the current socio-political climate? And how might sex education evolve to remain evidence-based, context-responsive, and equitable?
About our speakers:
Anneke Newman is an anthropologist of development based at the Laboratoire d'anthropologie des mondes contemporains at the ULB. For 15 years she has critically researched Female Genital Mutilation/Cutting, teen pregnancy and child and forced marriage in West Africa and advocates for culturally-sensitive approaches to such gendered challenges that avoid triggering resistance and backlash.
Lise Rosquin is a PhD researcher at the Research Group on Social Policy, Social Work, Public Opinion and Population Dynamics (ReSPOND), KU Leuven and the Institute for Family and Sexuality Studies, KU Leuven. She is working on a project on polarisation regarding sexuality education, with a focus on public opinion research in Belgium. More specifically, she is studying attitudes towards sexuality education and how they are related with individual-level factors and embedded in broader ideologies.
Wannes Magits is a Policy Officer on Sexual Development at Sensoa, the Flemish expertise center on sexual health. He focuses on the development of educational tools to provide comprehensive sexual education and tools to implement school policies on sexual health and integrity.
