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Globalizing ‘Abstinence-Only’: The U.S. Christian Right Campaign Against Comprehensive Sexuality Education
Abstract
This chapter discusses the role that U.S.-based pro-family groups have played in mobilizing and coordinating campaigns against Comprehensive Sexuality Education (CSE) in African countries. The U.S. abstinence-only movement is discussed, providing historical context to the contemporary Stop CSE campaign that gained momentum in several African countries in the late 2010s. In addition to their activities to create moral panic about sexuality education in Africa, the chapter examines the efforts of pro-family groups to grow a coalition against Comprehensive Sexuality Education at the United Nations. The anti-LGBTIQ+ underpinnings of the Stop CSE campaign are further considered as a strategy through which pro-family groups are mainstreaming intolerance towards queer and transgender people and communities.
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Whilst significant progress has been made in recent years with respect to advancing health and education, the ESA region’s young people still experience challenges in relation to their SRHR. This study brings together learning from the available data and reports, as well as the experiences of those closely connected with the process of affirmation/endorsement and implementation of the ESA Commitment between 2013 and 2018. Whilst challenges remain – particularly in relation to monitoring and accountability – the ESA Commitment has instigated notable progress, made possible in part by the emphasis on multisectoral collaboration between health and education sectors nationally and regionally. Sustained political, technical, and financial investment in young people’s health and rights will ensure that the countries of the region are able to build upon these successes and deliver on their commitments to young people during this decade of action towards the realisation of the SDGs and harnessing the demographic dividend for Africa for years to come.
Introduction
This article examines recent moral panics over sex education in Uganda from historical perspectives. Public outcry over comprehensive sexuality education erupted in 2016 over claims that children were being taught “homosexuality” by international NGOs. Subsequent debates over sex education revolved around defending what public figures claimed were national, religious, and cultural values from foreign infiltration.
Methods
This paper is grounded in a survey of Uganda’s two English-print national newspapers (2016–2018), archival research of newspapers held at Uganda’s Vision Group media company (1985–2005), analyses of public rhetoric as reported in internationally and nationally circulating media, textual analysis of Uganda’s National Sexuality Education Framework (2018), formal interviews with Ugandan NGO officers (3), and semi-structured interviews with Ugandan educators (3).
Results
Uganda’s current panic over sex education reignited longstanding anxieties over foreign interventions into the sexual health and rights of Ugandans. We argue that in the wake of a 35-year battle with HIV/AIDS and more recent controversies over LGBT rights, both of which brought international donor resources and governance, the issue of where and how to teach young people about sex became a new battleground over the state’s authority to govern the health and economic prosperity of its citizens.
Conclusions
Ethno- and religio-nationalist rhetoric used to oppose the state’s new sexuality education policy was also used to justify sex education as a tool for economic development.
Policy Implications
Analyzing rhetoric mobilized by both supporters and detractors of sex education reveals the contested political terrain policy advocates must navigate in Uganda and other postcolonial contexts.
Background:
Comprehensive Sexuality Education (CSE) is increasingly gaining traction within the international community. CSE is regarded as an important means of informing young people about their rights and sexual health, improving public health outcomes and contributing to sustainable development.
Context and objective:
Considerable variation exists in understandings regarding what makes sexuality education ‘comprehensive’. To gain greater clarity on what CSE is seen to be and entails, and how this form of sexuality education compares with other approaches, a review of existing programmatic and scholarly literatures was conducted.
Design:
This literature review analyses a range of CSE guidelines and academic sources engaging with the subject of CSE, and sexuality education more broadly.
Method:
Analysis of stated goals and means of CSE to identify core components of this form of education.
Results:
Four sets of core CSE components are identified, yet the analysis shows that the intended breadth of this type of sexuality education leaves considerable space for interpretation, with key concepts often remaining abstract. Furthermore, addressing the core elements of CSE and achieving its ‘emancipatory’ goals can work to exclude particular perspectives and subjectivities.
Conclusion:
The review draws attention to the politics of knowledge production at play in decisions concerning what is deemed ‘comprehensive’, for whom, when and where. It concludes that the notion of ‘comprehensive’ is a matter of degree, and that reaching consensus on a set of universal standards regarding what can be deemed as ‘comprehensive’ may neither be possible nor desirable. The analysis will be useful for those interested in more careful engagement with CSE and, specifically, in examining features that, in practice, may run counter to the original goals.
Today, more than half of the world population is under the age of 25 years and one in four is under age 18. The urgency of expanding access to Comprehensive Sexuality Education (CSE) notably for children and young people in Africa and Asia is greater than ever before. However, many challenges to the implementation and delivery of CSE in resource poor settings have been identified in the literature. CSE’s effectiveness could be strongly improved if these challenges were better met. This paper aims to contribute to those much-needed improvements by sharing lessons learned from a decade of implementation of one particular CSE programme, The World Starts With Me, among various populations in 11 low income countries in Africa and Asia. The aims, content, reach and effectiveness of the programme are described. Next, the challenges for implementation and delivery at student, teacher, school and context level are discussed with reference to the wider knowledge base in this area. Finally, suggestions are provided for ways forward including the increased sensitivity of programmes for normative and practical barriers to sexual health, further advancement towards gender transformativity, a far-reaching expansion of comprehensive forms of teacher training and coaching, and a serious stepping-up of multilevel ‘whole school’ approaches.
This study investigated the attitudes of 43 teachers and school administrators towards sex education, young people's sexuality and their communities in 19 secondary schools in rural KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa, and how these attitudes affect school-based HIV prevention and sex education. In interviews, teachers expressed judgemental attitudes towards young people's sexuality and pregnant students, and focused on girls' perceived irresponsible behaviour instead of strategies to minimise HIV risk. Despite general awareness of the HIV epidemic, few teachers perceived it as an immediate threat, and teachers' own HIV risk was infrequently acknowledged. Teachers perceived themselves to have higher personal standards and moral authority than members of the communities and schools they served. Male administrators' authority to determine school policies and teachers' attitudes towards sexuality fundamentally affect the content and delivery of school-based sexuality education and HIV prevention activities. Opportunities to create a supportive educational environment for students and for female teachers are frequently missed. Improving teachers' efficacy to deliver impartial, non-judgemental and accurate information about sex and HIV is essential, as are efforts to acknowledge and address their own HIV risks.
This article chronicles the impact on sexuality policy in the United States of the rise of the Religious Right as a significant
force in American politics. Using a case study analysis of abortion-reproductive rights and sexuality education, it narrates
the story of how U.S. policy debates and practices have changed since the 1970s as sexual conservatism rose in prominence
and sexual progressives declined in power. The Religious Right’s appeal to traditional moral values and its ability to create
moral panics about sexuality are addressed, specifically with regard to abortion and sexuality education. Ultimately, political
meddling and moral proscriptions, disregard for scientific evidence, and the absence of a coherent approach regarding sexual
and reproductive health rights have undermined sexuality policy in the United States. The article ends on a cautious note
of optimism, suggesting that the Religious Right may have overreached in its attempt to control sexuality policy.
This paper reports on research with 11 high school teachers in Durban and draws on positioning theory to raise important questions on the teaching of issues relating to homosexuality and bisexuality within sexuality education. Using data collected from classroom observations and in-depth interviews, it demonstrates that issues related to sexual diversity were in most cases ignored or avoided by teachers and when teachers did include aspects of homosexuality, they took up positions that endorsed the idea of 'compulsory heterosexuality'. I conclude by paying attention to ways we can deepen the teaching of homosexual and bisexual issues.
The United States ranks first among developed nations in rates of both teenage pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases. In an effort to reduce these rates, the U.S. government has funded abstinence-only sex education programs for more than a decade. However, a public controversy remains over whether this investment has been successful and whether these programs should be continued. Using the most recent national data (2005) from all U.S. states with information on sex education laws or policies (N = 48), we show that increasing emphasis on abstinence education is positively correlated with teenage pregnancy and birth rates. This trend remains significant after accounting for socioeconomic status, teen educational attainment, ethnic composition of the teen population, and availability of Medicaid waivers for family planning services in each state. These data show clearly that abstinence-only education as a state policy is ineffective in preventing teenage pregnancy and may actually be contributing to the high teenage pregnancy rates in the U.S. In alignment with the new evidence-based Teen Pregnancy Prevention Initiative and the Precaution Adoption Process Model advocated by the National Institutes of Health, we propose the integration of comprehensive sex and STD education into the biology curriculum in middle and high school science classes and a parallel social studies curriculum that addresses risk-aversion behaviors and planning for the future.
Objectives:
To examine the relationship between adolescent pregnancy-prevention and sexuality and abstinence-only education funding and adolescent birthrates over time. Also, to determine whether state ideology plays a moderating role on adolescent reproductive health, that is, whether the funding has its intended effect at reducing the number of adolescent births in conservative but not in liberal states.
Methods:
We modeled time-series data on federal abstinence-only and adolescent pregnancy-prevention and sexuality education block grants to US states and rates of adolescent births (1998-2016) and adjusted for state-level confounders using 2-way fixed-effects models.
Results:
Federal abstinence-only funding had no effect on adolescent birthrates overall but displayed a perverse effect, increasing adolescent birthrates in conservative states. Adolescent pregnancy-prevention and sexuality education funding eclipsed this effect, reducing adolescent birthrates in those states.
Conclusions:
The millions of dollars spent on abstinence-only education has had no effect on adolescent birthrates, although conservative states, which experience the greatest burden of adolescent births, are the most responsive to changes in sexuality education-funding streams.
This paper mobilizes transdisciplinary inquiry to explore and deconstruct the often-used comparison of racialized/colonized people, intellectually disabled people and mad people as being like children. To be childlike is a metaphor that is used to denigrate, to classify as irrational and incompetent, to dismiss as not being knowledge holders, to justify governance and action on others’ behalf, to deem as being animistic, as undeveloped, underdeveloped or wrongly developed, and, hence, to subjugate. We explore the political work done by the metaphorical appeal to childhood, and particularly the centrality of the metaphor of childhood to legitimizing colonialism and white supremacy. The article attends to the ways in which this metaphor contributes to the shaping of the material and discursive realities of racialized and colonized others, as well as those who have been psychiatrized and deemed “intellectually disabled”. Further, we explore specific metaphors of child-colony, and child-mad-“crip”. We then detail the developmental logic underlying the historical and continued use of the metaphorics of childhood, and explore how this makes possible an infantilization of colonized peoples and the global South more widely. The material and discursive impact of this metaphor on children’s lives, and particularly children who are racialized, colonized, and/or deemed mad or “crip”, is then considered. We argue that complex adult-child relations, sane-mad relations and Western-majority world relations within global psychiatry, are situated firmly within pejorative notions of what it means to be childlike, and reproduce multi-systemic forms of oppression that, ostensibly in their “best interests”, govern children and all those deemed childlike.
The abstinence movement in the USA, as a sector of the Christian Right, advocates abstinence before marriage and links abstinence to Evangelical Christian morality, sexual purity, and heterosexual marriage. A number of single-issue abstinence groups have formed over the past 10 to 15 years in the USA; their political success in advocating a ‘values-based’ response to sexuality and the current scope of abstinence education is unprecedented in US politics. With the election of President Obama, however, the movement faced the loss of the majority of its funding and powerful elite allies. Using in-depth interviews with directors of four groups that comprise the core of the movement, this article analyzes the movement’s agenda and strategies at this critical juncture in its history.
Sexual and reproductive health (SRH) education is one way Namibia combats HIV/AIDS. This exploratory study had two objectives: to investigate attitudes and perceptions towards sex education, and to see what purpose sex education serves in Namibia. To what extent do stakeholders support sex education in Namibia? What kind of obstacles exists to SRH education in Namibia? We believe that knowing how people perceive sex education is necessary for implementing and fine‐tuning SRH programmes. Eighteen focus group discussions and eight key informant interviews were used to assess SRH education issues. There was broad support for SRH education among stakeholders. Teachers have very little training in SRH education; some are reportedly uninspiring while Namibia suffers from a paucity of teaching materials. SRH teachers would like active parental support, but many parents are suspicious of schools teaching SRH and do not have an idea what to do. There is need for the students to be graded in sex education for them to value it more. Namibia should also invest more in training SRH teachers.
Abstract Abstinence-until-marriage (AUM) - strongly supported by religious conservatives in the USA - became a key element of initial human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) prevention efforts under the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR). AUM programmes have demonstrated limited efficacy in changing behaviours, promoted medically inaccurate information and withheld life-saving information about risk reduction. A focus on AUM also undermined national efforts in Africa to create integrated youth HIV prevention programmes. PEPFAR prevention efforts after 2008 shifted to science-based programming, however, vestiges of AUM remain. Primary prevention programmes within PEPFAR are essential and nations must be able to design HIV prevention based on local needs and prevention science.
Throughout the 1990s, during my field research into conflicts over sexuality education, I was initially riveted by what I found—public discussions that flared into furious arguments. Neighbors hurled epithets like "fascist" and "McCarthyite" at each other, while school board meetings went from sleepy affairs to late-night shouting matches involving hundreds of residents. Adrenaline buzzed throughout public meetings, all of us alert to the next outburst. School board members told me about receiving death threats, being spit on, and having tires slashed. After explosive meetings they received police escorts to their cars. One prominent sex education foe collapsed from an anxiety attack during his speech at an especially rancorous meeting, while those of us left waiting in the school auditorium worried in hushed whispers that he had died of a heart attack. Sex education conflicts escalated rapidly through the 1990s and spread to nearby cities as though contagious. Sensational media coverage heightened these public battles, while officials scrambled for solutions. These were the feelings of community controversies, local dramas played out in the shadow of national politics.
To paraphrase the British sociologist Stanley Cohen, societies appear to be subject, every now and then, to periods of sex panic. A derivative of Cohen's concept "moral panic," the term sex panic was coined in 1984 by the anthropologist Carole Vance to explain volatile battles over sexuality. Both moral panic and sex panic have been used by activists and the media and have been adopted and revised by sociologists, historians, and cultural studies scholars. Prominent researchers, among them Estelle Freedman, Gayle Rubin, Jeffrey Weeks, and Lisa Duggan, deployed the panic metaphor—moral panic, sex-crime panic, AIDS panic, or sex panic—to explore political conflict, sexual regulation, and public volatility about sex.
A vivid analytic term, moral panic bespeaks the mobilization of intense affect in the service of moral politics. Cohen's moral panic, which described the 1960s reaction to rioting by youth groups (the mods and the rockers) in the vacation town of Brighton, featured angry crowds milling at British seacoast towns and hyperbolic media coverage. Likewise, sex panic aptly captured the hostile political climate during late-twentieth-century controversies over gay rights, censorship, and sex education.
Sex panics are significant because they are "the political moment of sex," which Weeks and Rubin both describe as the transmogrification of moral values into political action. I extend their important claim by suggesting that public emotion is a powerful catalyst in effecting this political moment. In this article, I suggest that we can enhance the analytic power of the moral/sex panic framework by integrating social theories of emotion.
As I discuss below, the sex panic literature tends to focus on structural elements, in particular the expansion of state power through institutional mechanisms of regulation. Public feeling, although acknowledged in passing by most sex panic scholars, is often represented as anarchic, moblike, and hysterical, all descriptions that recall late-nineteenth-century critiques of the irrational crowd. Lack of attention to public sentiment in the sex panic literature is likely intended to minimize its importance, in contrast to moral conservatives who exaggerate the significance of collective outrage to legitimate social control. As Cohen noted in the recent thirtieth-anniversary edition of Folk Devils and Moral Panics, political progressives tend to use the term moral panic to expose collective volatility as "tendentious." Unfortunately, however, this strategy places the panic of a sex panic outside social and political reach. I am suggesting that we broaden our analysis of sex panics to include their deep emotional dimensions, including how emotions braid through and legitimize structures of domination.
Overt emotion is not only increasingly acceptable but seemingly required in contemporary politics, where it conveys righteous solidarity and demands state intervention. Contemporary Western societies consider feelings the core of the self; they are constructed as a site of truth and ethics. Hence feelings, as Michel Foucault has argued, are "the main field of morality," and indeed of the moral panic. In contrast to scholars who view the emotions of sex panics as irrational, moral conservatives cast them as authentic moral outrage. Because of its cultural authority, public emotion can pressure politicians, police, media, and other regulatory agents to...
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