As part of the DO…RSE for Schools project, we asked young people about their RSE. We were struck by how little they were taught about the emotional aspects of sex and relationships. Where they were taught it was reduced to overly simple key messages.

Overly simple ‘key messages’

Students were given talks on consent, sexuality or self-esteem which amounted to a key ‘take home’ message. Messages such as: ‘just say no’, ‘it’s okay to be gay’, or ‘love yourself before you love someone else’. They dismissed such lessons as having no relevance to them. When you think about it, it’s not a surprise. 

Take a moment to think about this for yourself in private. Think about how you feel about yourself. What affects how you feel about yourself? Are there expectations placed on you around gender and sexuality? What did you learn growing up about relationships. Are some kinds of relationships more valuable to you than others? Why?

If it doesn’t work for you, why should it work for your students?

Think about all your relationships – how do you make them work? How do you meet the needs of other people in your life without neglecting your own? How easy is it for you to say ‘no’ to a partner, friend, colleague, family member? The students we are teaching are often going through much of the same stuff that we are dealing with. Why should it be any simpler for them than it is for us?

If you’re already an RSE practitioner, you might want to come on my new Advanced RSE Training course.

Teaching Holistic RSE

Sex and relationships is also an extremely complicated topic because one aspect can’t be taught in isolation from another. For example we can’t teach ‘just say no’ without also addressing that this relates to how we feel about ourselves. That if we feel bad about ourselves compared to other people we may feel that we aren’t allowed to say no.

If there is a power difference in the relationship, where there is more at stake for us than the other person, we might feel we really can’t say no. If we have little decision making power over our bodies, we might not have experienced what saying no feels like. And that much of the wider societal messages we receive encourage us not to say no, particularly to someone who says they love us. 

A young person in our research summed this up perfectly “They just say ‘just say no’ but sometimes people don’t feel confident to do that.” They were saying to us that ‘emotional’ or ‘relationships’ side of SRE was best delivered when young people were asked to think about things themselves. Simply being told what to think in a lecture isn’t real or relevant for them. 

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The use of facts

However the same is also true for the more factual elements of SRE. Information about sexually transmitted infections (STIs), conception, contraception and the law can be taught much more simply. Information can be conveyed simply and effectively through powerpoint presentations, demonstrations and worksheets. So often the temptation is to stick to these topics – with clear learning outcomes and clear messages. But even here young people say that they learn too much about the ‘what’ and not enough about the ‘how’. 

“It separated it from people and just put it in scientific terms … ”

They might learn what STIs are, the different types, transmission routes, long term effects and treatments. However, they don’t learn as much about how to ask for help, or how to talk to a partner about risks, how to deal with the stigma surrounding STIs or how to negotiate safer sex. They might learn what the law is around sexting a sexual image. But how about how to deal with a partner pestering them for an image. Getting support if an image is shared without consent. How gender and power might result in status for some and stigma for others, or how to reduce the risks of sexting. 

The information is there but students aren’t given the opportunity to explore real life situations, how they can get help, how they can support others or how they can change culture of stigma. If students feel that they are simply being told what to think, or being scared off sex altogether, they will simply switch off. Young people may remember names of STIs, or the legal age for sexting, but how useful is this kind of sex education if they can’t put it into practice?

How Can We Change This?

When we were writing the DO… resources we wanted to address this challenge. RSE is a complicated topic but trying to simplify everything into something that would work for every young person won’t work and never has. 

This approach is also really hard to teach. How do we decide on the key message that will work for most students? How do we get to that point without excluding some people? The challenge of making all this engaging enough. How can we appear confident when we are teaching these key messages when we might be struggling with this stuff ourselves? Reducing SRE to simple messages implies that we find all this simple and have it all sorted and that students don’t. The Tea and Consent video is a perfect example of this. We wanted to get away from teachers feeling they have to be experts in sex and relationships, pretending to know all the answers. It makes teachers feel under confident and students can tell when a teacher doesn’t feel confident talking about SRE. 

How to do engaging RSE

So with DO … we shifted the focus from just imparting information and simple key messages to something more engaging and challenging. However as well as embracing the complexity of sex and relationships, we made it easier to teach. We created a set of lesson plans and supporting resources that don’t require specialist knowledge of sex and relationships but instead rely on the skills that teachers already have. These resources are about facilitating really engaging conversations rather than just talking and not listening.

We made it easier for teachers to make it easier for students to talk to each other about the issues that really matter. They are encouraged to reflect on their own values and the messages they have received about sex, gender, sexuality, themselves, consent, love and safer sex. In order to ask them to think, rather than telling them what to think, we wrote truly engaging lesson plans. All the activities are participatory: students getting involved in pairs or small groups whilst allowing them to get as involved as they want to.

You might also find my Bad Sex Ed Bingo resource useful over at BISH.

Making it about them not us

They get to explore these topics for themselves facilitated by creative and innovative learning methods: creating fictional characters to explore gender, using wordstorms to explore how they feel about themselves, practice handshakes to understand how consent feels, learning about love through diagrams and graphs, card sorts to figure out safer sex, asking some big questions about why people have sex or relationships. The course ends with a unique problem solving lesson. Where students to take part in independent learning exercise where they respond to several ‘problem page’ questions.

It’s a complex topic, but easier to deliver than you think

These activities allow for students to really understand how complex RSE can be. However the lesson plans are not complex. They are clearly laid out and structured so that each lesson builds on the next. Throughout there are detailed instructions on how to run the activities. As well as lots of great questions you can ask – if you really want to open the discussion up with students. There’s nothing quite like facilitating a really engaging lesson on RSE. It can be truly fascinating to hear the insights of young people. The key is to remember that your expertise here is not that of a sex education expert (sexpert). You’re a great teacher delivering really engaging, exciting and challenging lessons. So crack the lessons plans out, pin your ears back and start some really great conversations about sex and relationships.

For resources and support to make great RSE happen in your school download the resources, for free, from here.

The post It’s Simple, Sex and Relationships are Complex appeared first on Bish Training - Sex & Relationships Education.

RSE videos tend to be passive

Watching an RSE video is a very passive activity which is not great. It’s easy to stop paying attention to a video, particularly if it is a whole lesson, because we can go into relaxation mode and switch off. We want students to be switched on and thinking critically about the messages we receive about relationships, sex, sexuality, and gender.

Makes it about us not them

The action of putting an RSE video on can send out a lot of indirect messages to students if we’re not careful. ‘What I have to say is the most important thing here.’ ‘Listen to the message of this video and learn it.’ ‘I’m more interested in what this video has to say than what you have to say.’ Whatever our motivations for showing a video, the message it can send out is that it’s more about what we think is important to say in RSE rather than what students have to say and think.

If you’re already an RSE practitioner, you might want to come on my new Advanced RSE Training course.

Consent issues

It’s very hard to opt out of watching a video, so we need to be super careful about making everyone watch a video. Just as watching a film in a cinema can be a tricky experience for many, watching a video can be very tricky for your students. If a film features trauma, violence, threats, abuse, shocking scenes, or sex then this can be upsetting. Also you don’t know what your students will find difficult.

So this means that with any video you show, you need to give advance warning so that students can opt out of seeing it. It’s also best practice to tell parents too. Then if students are opting out (or want to opt out) you might want to think about whether there is a better RSE resource that can include everyone.

It’s important to think about the process of RSE as much as the content. If we show a video that is all about consent, but then don’t give students the option to not watch the RSE video, or even further, traumatise students as a result, then what are they really learning about consent?

Top tips for teaching about consent

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Diversity

The difficulty with videos with people in them is that you can only be as diverse as those people who are in them.

So I know everyone loves Screwball (meh) and yes it has a black character and a white character, and yes it’s not entirely about penis in vagina sex (which can exclude a lot of people), but it doesn’t say a lot about the different oppressions that people of colour face, or anything on disability, or LGBTQ folk, or asexual folk, or intersex folk…. I’m not having a go at Screwball here (I think it’s funny and has a nice tone and the actors were great) I’m just pointing out the limitations of showing one story line in one film. If we spend most of our lessons showing videos like this, then it’s on us if we’re just teaching about the heterosexual experience.

Tips for inclusive RSE teaching

The region of the characters can make a difference too. One of my favourite videos, back in the day, was the Weird and Wonderful World of Billy Ballgreedy by FPA. Everyone had quite thick Northern Irish accents, which is probably great for its intended audience, but did nothing for the lads I was working with in Derby. Which is a shame because I thought it was great.

For this reason, when I make video for BISH (which are not for showing in classrooms, they’re for young people to watch in their own time) I use images and animations so that I can try to make them as diverse and inclusive as possible. It’s hard to do, so they are not very long, and they are also not very good!

Creates more work

Putting a video on shouldn’t be the RSE equivalent of putting Peppa Pig on when we are trying to have a five minutes sit down babysitting our niece (ahem). We need to watch the video to make sure that we don’t run into the consent issues above. Also we should check that it’s making the point we’re wanting it to make. I’m not a huge fan of instilling ‘key messages’ into young people, but what are the key messages of the video you’re showing? Do they need unpacking? How are you going to do that? Also it’s good to critique who is making the video, why it’s being made, and what might be some of the underlying assumptions of the video. Videos are rarely values neutral . They rarely give students the opportunity to consider their own values and to build on them.

It’s a faff

For a start it can be hard to find the video you want. Maybe it’s gone off iplayer, or YouTube has taken it down, or it now has a load of adverts on it, or it’s really expensive, or you don’t have a licence to show it in school, or it takes ages to buffer, or it’s really low resolution. That time might better be spent finding some more interactive and inclusive RSE resources.

Also, it’s a faff making the videos work in the classroom. Turning the lights off, closing the curtains, making sure everyone can see. Also we need to make sure it’s loud enough and has audio descriptions, or subtitles for those that need them.

5/10 minute clip

This might sound like we’re fun sponges! We occasionally use video clips ourselves. Using shorter clips can help avoid some of the above problems – also it’s less work to watch the video. Use the clips as an injection of humour, or something to help you shift from one topic to another, or to introduce something really powerful like a Hollie McNish poem. https://www.youtube.com/user/holliemcnish/videos

Make it interactive

Instead of watching an RSE video passively you could make it more interactive by stopping the video at key points. Ask them about a character in the film, what might they feeling, what might they be thinking, what previous life experiences have got them to this point, what’s their biography, how is this likely to play out, what should they do, what can their friends do.

You could put students in small teams and have them follow a character, making it more creative by asking them to draw outlines of their character and write words or draw images around them.

Maybe you could put all this in a worksheet and ask students to be filling this in as they go. You could also do a simple observation quiz to keep them engaged.

I did a video about consent and negotiation which has various stopping points so that students can do some small group work to generate ideas.

Developing videos with students

This can be a lot of fun and really useful too, particularly if the video is about local services. You could arrange a visit to a local sexual health service to show everyone how to get there and what to expect. I’ve done that myself (though I had to do the editing) and in your schools you will have technology and students to be able to turn it into a cross-curricula project. They could also film themselves doing talking heads, interviews, point of view shots. They could edit a bunch of vox pops of different young people’s views on a topic. Perhaps you could get students to do my talk for a minute activity which I have in my Consent Teaching pack, for example.

Students could bring in their own video clips

One way of showing RSE videos, but still making it about the students not us, is to ask students to bring in videos or clips to show everyone. Obviously you would have to either trust your students a lot to not bring in anything inappropriate (the group agreement is your friend here), or you would have to vet everything. Some students asked me to play them a video from the inbetweeners once when I was teaching them about sexual scripts, which was absolutely perfect. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0HDzfuYHz6U

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Pictures of STIs in RSE – evidence

You might think that the widespread use pictures of STIs in RSE might be based on some kind of evidence of their effectiveness. Nope! Dr Alyssa Lederer, applied behavioural scientist and health education specialist, found the following:

“In 2016 I conducted an experiment with young people enrolled in a large public Midwestern university. Participants watched one of two randomly assigned web-based sexual health programs, one with graphic sexually transmitted infection images and the other without such images but otherwise identical. I then compared the two groups of participants to assess their knowledge, beliefs, and behavioral intentions related to sexually transmitted infections. Overall outcomes were the same, but when I asked participants to provide feedback, more than a quarter of those that saw the graphic images expressed disgust and dismay. These results suggest that presenting such images may prompt stigma – without having any health benefit.” This point about stigma is very important, which I’ll come on to next.

Find out how I can help with your RSE

Fear appeals don’t work either

Meanwhile other studies looking at the effect that scare tactics, also known as ‘fear appeals’, show a similar lack of evidence of effectiveness. Allison Earl and Dolores Albarracín’s study looked into the use of fear appeals. They explicitly talking about the dangers of HIV transmission during a consultation as part of HIV testing. They found that fear appeals during these consultations: “increased perceptions of risk at the immediate follow-up but decreased knowledge and condom use.” This study also found that this decreased condom use following a fear appeal actually strengthened over time (a spiraling effect). Importantly, when interventions instead offered HIV counselling and testing there was an increase of knowledge. Then an increase in condom use and this effect strengthened over time.

If you’re already an RSE practitioner, you might want to come on my new Advanced RSE Training course.

We need an abundance model

There has been a long history of study of fear appeals or scare tactics and the evidence is contradictory. Some may work in some interventions where individuals are scared enough to want to change their behaviour. IF that change is feasible and accessible to them. However, using a condom is not always easy. Some people find using them easier than others. Earl and Albarracin’s study (and also other studies) suggests that messaging which promotes the gains of condom use, rather than highlighting the losses of condom non-use, are more successful in both the short term and also in the long term.

So studies in the classroom and studies from clinics suggest that scare tactics don’t work. They may even be counterproductive for safer sex practices. Why else might it be a bad idea?

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They Create Stigma

As Dr Alysssa Lederer found that showing images of diseased genitals did not increase the knowledge of students but that it did increase levels of stigma. Study after study shows that stigma has a huge role to play in delaying young people’s attendance at a sexual health clinic, even when they think that they may have symptoms of an STI.

“To promote prompt treatment-seeking, interventions must also address both STI-specific and other forms of social stigma which may limit access to care.” Malta, et al 2007

“Strenuous efforts should be made to overcome the stigma associated with STIs and, by default, GUM services, and to present sexual health services in a way that is seen as inclusive and relevant to a wide range of individuals.” Anne Scoular, et al 2001

“High perceived seriousness about symptoms has both cognitive and emotional components that may function independently to either promote or delay STD-related care seeking.” Cunningham, et all 2005

Which leads to increasing STI transmission

Sexual health education, which seeks to ‘disgust and dismay’ is going to create more stigma around STIs and thus around accessing treatment. (Although there have been significant increases in young people accessing sexual health services due to the expansion of young people’s sexual health services in the noughties). Delaying treatment, or avoiding treatment, increases the risk of transmission and increases the risk of long-term health effects.

In addition, showing pictures of STIs in RSE risks perpetuating other harmful stigmas around sex, which invariably intersect with oppression. Together this sends a message that there are certain ‘kinds of people’ who are at risk of STIs. These messages are homo/biphobic, racist, classist, and definitely sexist. It also creates this problematic and sex negative ‘other’ who has, and might even enjoy, sex. RSE should be trying to address these kinds of messages, not perpetuate them.

So showing these images of disease sends out messages about sexuality and stigma. This is harmful and counterproductive and also inaccurate.

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They are Inaccurate

The majority of cases of STIs don’t have any symptoms. Even where there are symptoms they might be very mild and so not recognisable. They may be confused with other infections or conditions (such as a heavy cold).

The graphic images of STIs which are used in sex education show individuals with symptoms. So in order to be accurate people showing these images should also be showing pictures of people with STIs but no symptoms. We don’t do that. This is because 1) people with asymptomatic STIs are not deemed worthy of photographing by medical professionals. 2) a lot of people find it inappropriate to show young people pictures of genitals without symptoms ie, just genitals.

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Furthermore, the symptomatic pictures of genitals are atypical. That is to say, they show large clusters of warts, or voluminous discharge, or symptoms of tertiary syphilis. These are rare. So they don’t even show the kinds of images of symptoms that people may want to look for when they are checking out their bits in the shower or bath. Eg a small wart, or a blister, drops of blood, a small rash, or an unusual discharge.

Sidenote: I think that we should probably be doing more to teach young people about their genitals. In addition to teaching about diversity (and similarities) of genitals we should also be teaching more about vaginal discharge, papules, in-grown hairs – which are often mistaken for STIs.

… and this sends out an inaccurate learning outcome

So they are not typical images of STI symptoms and thus are not accurate images of STIs. They also have the effect of making STIs seem more serious than they are. The fact is that all STIs are treatable (although yes, gonorrhoea is getting more difficult to treat but is still pretty uncommon). Once treated it’s not common for STIs to have a long term effect for young people.

Even rates of HPV, which is the most common STI in the UK, are coming down dramatically thanks to the HPV vaccine for young people. Rates of genital warts (which are low risk STIs not associated with cervical cancer or any other long term effects, but still feature heavily in graphic images of STIs) have reduced by nearly 80% in young people. We’ve seen that scare tactics don’t work, but we also saw that an overemphasis of how serious STIs are will also increase stigma.

So How Should We Teach About STIs?

Even though we should still teach about STIs, we probably need to tone down some of the messaging. This means we have to a) remove the scare tactics and b) usualise STIs just like we might with any other illness. We should also shift the emphasis to talking about how to negotiate safer sex. Giving people the tools to do this and how to access sexual health services.

Below are some images I made for @BishSexEd on Instagram and Twitter, feel free to download these STI slides and use them in your classes.

You could also try my STI quiz over at BISH which I describe as “a fiendishly difficult quiz but also pretty chilled out and quite real life.” Also there’s my Safer Sex Aces resource or using my Condom Teaching Pack

You could also try the Safer Sex lesson plan over at DO… RSE for Schools,  which I wrote with Alice Hoyle.

There are some more really great ideas about how to teach about STIs in this lovely article by Chella Quint.

The post Should We Show Pictures of STIs in RSE? appeared first on Bish Training - Sex & Relationships Education.

(This post taken from Bish Newsletter Number 3. To sign up for the Bish Newsletter (free resources, ideas, new things, special offers) fill in the box on the right here—>)

As you may well be aware I am on twitter (@bishtraining) which is a great place to engage with people I wouldn’t normally come into contact, it’s a great place to connect with other sex educators, researchers, activists and allies around the world. We campaign about various things: dodgy papers, crappy TV programmes, politics that kind of thing. I recommend getting involved.

So it was on twitter that I found out that May is Masturbation Month! That’s right, Masturbation Month. Porn companies and sex shops are tweeting about it a lot (they put #MasturbationMonth in their tweets so that people can click on it and see what everyone else is saying about that topic).

I thought it would be a great excuse to raise the issue from a sex education/sexual health point of view. Sexual health is not just about absence of disease or unwanted pregnancy but the possibility of having safe pleasurable sex. (see the W.H.O. definition of sexual health). What better example is there of safe and pleasurable sex than masturbation?

Yet talking about it can be difficult. There’s a lot of stigma around sex, we live in a sex negative world (think of a swear word, is it to do with sex? What does that say?) so talking about sexual pleasure is frowned upon. People often find that it is more acceptable to talk about the harms of sex than the pleasures and positives of sex.

In addition to the stigma around sex there is also additional stigma for masturbation. Social and media discourses about sex often frame it purely as a physical, penetrative and partnered act. It often feels like the messages we receive about sex is that there is a normal way to do it and any other way is not acceptable. Masturbation is seen as being dirty and weak and a poor substitute for ‘real’ sex.

So to help I’ve put a handout and poster together (see below), which hopefully will make talking about masturbation easier. Perhaps you can give it to people in clinic settings, or leave it on a coffee table, or use it to teach with. You have a licence to make a reasonable number of copies with it for educational purposes. If you have any questions or want to make loads of copies please ask me.

There are other resources about masturbation over at bishUK.com http://bishuk.com/tag/masturbation/ The latest in my parent’s guides is around masturbation and is particularly aimed at parents of teens with learning difficulties. It’s very much a beta work in progress so feedback about this would be great.

So why not join twitter and use the #MasturbationMonth hashtag to tell the world what you’re doing to promote self-love this month.

Have a fantastic May….

Justin
PS read this great piece on Masturbation Month by Charlie Glickman

Click to open. Save and print.

Click to open. Save and print

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According to the Guardian, Ed Vaizey MP, Communications Minister, is set to talk with leading internet service providers in the UK about changing the way that pornography ‘enters’ UK homes. At the moment any internet customer can access any legal pornography. They would have to use filtering controls such as Cybersitter or Bumpercar if they wanted to prevent children and young people from accessing pornographic or sexually explicit materials.

Now first and foremost I’m worried about what effect this is going to have on me and on my websites. Look around. Look how much the word porn is used. In a sex and relationships education website aimed at teens it would be pretty remiss of me not to tackle porn head on. If you look here, you’ll see loads of posts about porn which aim to give young people the knowledge, skills and values to enable them to be critical about porn and sexy imagery. Often broad brush approaches to filtering mean that sites like mine are also affected, which would mean that young people would not be able to access my site.

So far so me me me.

However even if it wasn’t going to have an effect on me I’d still be very dubious about whether this would work at all.

Evidence

There is very little reliable evidence about the extent to which young people are watching sexually explicit materials and whether there any harms for children and young people in viewing such material.

Yes there was that ropey research in Psychologies magazine which involved one secondary school  and there was that You Gov poll conducted for an entertainment television programme about young people and porn called ‘The Sex Education Show’

However even the briefest look on Google Scholar will show you that there is not a lot of rigorous academic research in this area. Arguments about porn, such as arguments about sexualisation, are usually values rather than evidence based. There is certainly no consensus in the academic world about young people and porn.

I would encourage you to read what I believe (I’m a practitioner, not an academic) to be the most thorough recent paper http://www.springerlink.com/content/c1k7r32gj9q72248/ It points out the lack of evidence of the extent of porn consumption and harms from previous research. In their own work the authors find that the effects on individuals may in some cases be negative, but that these are very small effects.

Some small qualitative studies suggest that porn can be harmful to young people , whilst others suggest that it can have beneficial effects.

In my view, as a practitioner, there is not enough evidence to suggest that porn is being used extensively by young people and there is not enough evidence to suggest that porn is harmful or beneficial for young people. Certainly there isn’t enough evidence to base government policy on it.

Sex Education

What all academic research into porn seems to agree is that there needs to be more research into porn, but also more sex education about porn (da, daaaa!). There is a lot of concern about the consumption of pornography by young people, which may be driven more by personal and anecdotal experience, rather than be grounded in robust academic evidence. Preventing access to websites such as mine, which aim to provide this education, has obvious problems.

Sex education needs backing. It needs incentives for teachers to teach it, it needs money for specialist workers, training and resources and some also think it needs to be on the National Curriculum. We await the results of the education and public health white papers from the coalition on this, however the mood music I am hearing is not filling me with hope.

Porn Lock Is Unlikely To Prevent Access

Some young people really want to watch porn. Some are curious but aren’t really into it and some ‘are exposed’ to it.

Porn is available on phones via bluetooth, on the telly (Babestation, freeview adult channels for example), but also in magazines, national newspapers and candid sexual shots of celebrities (on the Daily Mail website). Porn and sexually explicit materials are still going to be available, except, under these proposals, sites like mine but also other sex bloggers who critique porn are not going to be available. So we’ll still have the problem but with no access to many of the tools to help solve it.

In my view internet controls need to remain in the hands of the parents, not ISPs. Parents and carers can have more control and can decide which sites they want to exclude or include in their filters. I’m sure that ISPs will feel the same way.

For further reading, read this excellent excellent article by Dr Petra

Read this excellent article by Violet Blue http://www.zdnet.com/blog/perlow/britain-considers-isp-filters-to-save-the-children-flawed-logic/14978?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=twitter&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+TechBroiler+%28Tech+Broiler%29

This is also an interesting take on the situation from Ms Naughty

Also thanks to @robmanuel and @quietriot_girl who have been campaigning about this on twitter today.

Thoughts? Comments?

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