Moral Rhetoric and Public Health Pragmatism: The Recent Politics of Sex Education

Abstract

Sex education seems to be an inherently problematic area of social policy, highlighting as it does tensions both within and between political traditions. The controversy that surrounds the development of policy in this area is testament to the complex interplay of political ideologies that signifies the boundaries of state intervention. School sex education, along with law on abortion and censorship, mark the political front line between the personal and the public. For libertarians this line falls between the individual and the state, for moralists, between the state and the family and for paternalists between the individual and the public good. Yet sex education is not only about the boundaries of state intervention, it is also a gendered debate. The political tensions that have shaped the development of sex education policy are rooted in the ways in which governments have responded or refused to respond to changes in the structure of the family and sexual relations. Sex education is potentially a vehicle for social engineering par excellence, be it progressive or traditional. Yet paradoxically, in an age of socio-sexual change and life-threatening sexually transmitted diseases, it is also a right and an entitlement. Sex education not only brings into focus tensions around gender, but also tensions around generation and the public acknowledgement of adolescent sexuality. Current debates around the age of consent for gay men and access to contraceptive advice for under-16s illustrate the ambiguity of the role of the law in this area. In this essay I will trace the evolution of contemporary sex education policy in England and Miales, focusing on the recent development of sex education policy from Thatcherism to the 1993 Education Act. In particular I will explore how tensions between education and health, between central and delegated control and between social authoritarianism and public health pragmatism have interacted to

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