Reporting from Sex::Tech: Grassroots Gender Justice and Peer-Based Education

India, South Africa, and Brazil are all home to projects that advocate for sexual health and reproductive rights within their communities, and strive to engage people - youth in particular - with activism around sexual rights.  The International Women's Health Coalition, based in NYC, sponsors many organizations that work to promote reproductive justice and sexual health for girls and women around the world.   

At the sex::tech conference, in a workshop called "Sexuality Rights on the Web and IRL" we got to learn about some of these projects and engage in a larger conversation around how we engage youth and adults in sexual and reproductive health advocacy issues.   

The YP foundation, designed to serve women and girls in India was founded by Ishita Chaudry when she was seventeen years old.  Starting with 3 young people; today they have developed over 1500 young changemakers, setting up over 100 projects focused on a variety of social justice issues including reproductive and sexual health initiatives.   Project 19, for example, was a youth led program that trained 40 young people on Understanding Sexual Reproductive Rights and Health and HIV/AIDS: they have just finished conducting 9 workshops with 500 young people across Delhi. In a video discussing the YP Foundation, Chaudry and Sharma discussed the benefits of online media for youth involvement with their foundation.  They brought up the pertinent issue of connectivity with youth through media with which they are already feel safe, comfortable and familiar, as well as the creativity of online media engaging the creativity of young people.  

Along with critical discussion of the issues impacting women and girls in India, the YP Foundation also creates and sustains a space for community-level discussion of the diverse projects being implemented by the young activists.  Recognizing that social justice work and advocacy cannot be done in isolation, the YP Foundation takes great pride in cultivating a sense of community among those working for social change in India. 

While the YP Foundation has found a medium through which to engage their immediate community, the next project we heard about, the Sonke Gender Justice Network discussed the challenges of connecting with their intended population.  Based out of South Africa, the Sonke Justice Gender Network is doing groundbreaking work with men, women, and youth in southern, central, and east Africa to achieve gender equality, prevent gender based violence, and reduce the spread and impact of HIV/AIDS on their communities. The One Man Can Campaign, just one of the projects of this organization, "supports men and boys to take action to end domestic and sexual violence and to promote healthy, equitable relationships that men and women can enjoy - passionately, respectfully and fully."  The One Man Can Campaign educates men and boys through coaches, faith community leaders, father and son communication and has used street surveying, visual media, music and other tools to get out their groundbreaking messages. 

Inspired by the Obama campaign, the Sonke Gender Justice Network is now newly expanding their work into the online arena, harnessing the power of ultilities such as Facebook in order to expand their fantastic outreach.   

However, while they often get positive feedback and support from people across the world, they have a more difficult time connecting with locals due to a lack of internet access across parts of Africa.  As an organization they are working tirelessly to find ways to spread their messages of equality and the power of the individual to engender change.  As technology evolves so does their thinking around how to best meet the emergent needs of Africans, particularly those living in South Africa, where the rates of intimate partner violence and rape are the highest in the world. 

Living Adolescence (Vivendo a Adolescencia) is a Brazilian teen sex education resource founded in 2000.  A government survey found it the website teens in Brazil most recognized for reliable sex information.  It has been evolving its focus over the years.  Beginning as an email question and answer service operated by its founder, Leandro Viera dos Santos, with funding it has expanded its scope and services, such as greater interactivity and lobbying for use by schools.  With a recent partnership with the IWHC, it has also been nurturing its users to become sexual and reproductive rights activists. 

Each of these organizations is working within the cultural frameworks for their target audiences, and while the work may look slightly different, they have quite a bit in common.  They all seek to bridge the gap between simply disseminating information and helping people apply the information to their lives on both personal and community levels.  For each of these organizations, education is a social justice issue as well as a form of activism itself. 

Information is only one piece of a larger picture.  Helping people make connections between their lived experiences and the political, social, and cultural contexts in which they live, underscores the empowerment potential of sex education.

Talking to school teachers about sexuality education so often elicits fear and anxiety about what it would mean to try to teach about a comprehensive, holistic, and inclusive view of sex and sexuality in that setting.  Teachers can be fearful of losing their positions, coming up against resistance from administration, school boards, and parents.

The value of sexuality education is also often framed as only being about how that education can reduce the risks of sex for young people.  While it's usually far bigger than that - helping also get to positive outcomes, to foster healthy relationships, to educate students about their bodies -- there are also other hidden benefits, benefits that aren't about sexuality at all, that also get overlooked.

Catherine Ashcraft, a professor at the University of Colorado, Boulder, spoke Sunday at sex::tech about the myriad ways in which sexuality education itself is a transformative experience in the classroom, and how the educational process-with sexuality as the subject-can improve academic outcomes that somehow seem less fraught and emotionally-charged than sexuality-specific outcomes.  

Ashcraft noted that when sexuality is used as a vehicle for education-rather than being seen as a threat to education-it becomes easy to reframe an argument for comprehensive sexuality education in schools.  She added that sexuality is essentially the most relevant topic that one could teach in schools.  Interest-driven learning is easy to achieve when conversations about sexuality are incorporated across the curriculum, not simply relegated to a health or physical education class, and when these conversations are not shut down.  A teacher's or administrator's unwillingness to engage these conversations creates an impediment to learning.  Current educational reform efforts include focus on media literacy and popular culture, service learning and civic engagement, and the integration of technology into learning.  Ashcraft that all of these reform areas dovetail beautifully with the study of sexuality, including the more relational and emotional aspects of sexuality.  

Ashcraft completed and published qualitative research about ESPERANZA, a community-based peer sex education program.  The transformations underwent by the peer educators, selected from a rigorous audition and interview process, were remarkable.  Ashcraft noted that the peer educators that participated in ESPERANZA went from seeing themselves as apathetic to activist, sex-crazed to sex-smart, and at-risk to at-promise.  The capacity to "be smart" about sexuality then extended into the possibility of being smart about other topics in school and life.  The participating educators were notably more future-oriented in their thinking about were able to envision themselves being successful in life beyond their participation in ESPERANZA.

Ashcraft's report about these outcomes were visibly demonstrated by the peer educators from PASSHEN (Peers Educating Safety and Sexual Health Education Now).  PASSHEN is a peer education program at Berkeley High School, in Berkeley, CA.  Funded through the Office of Traffic Safety, the PASSHEN peer educators speak in freshman and sophomore classes about sexuality as well as the risks of drunk driving and using substances. The youth educators are guided by three coordinators who help fact-check and assure that the youth-generated curriculum (revised by the educators each year in response to the needs of their school community) is accurate.

Related to the kinds of outcomes Ashcraft discussed, one PASSHEN peer educator spoke personally about how participating in the program impacted her: her GPA went up more than a full point after she started working with PASSHEN.

The PASSHEN educators led workshop participants through a myth/fact game (even stumping some audience members with a question about the connection between cold sores and herpes!) and also a rousing lesson on how to properly put on a condom.  Their style was engaging and it was easy to see how they connect with their audience and deliver positive messages about sex and sexuality in a way that is appealing to youth.  The PASSHEN educators receive school credit as well as stipends for their work, and they take it seriously.  Their commitment to reaching their peers and opening up conversations about sexuality absolutely shined through.  Echoing the findings of Catherine Ashcraft, we heard how involvement in PASSHEN helped them to achieve more academically, feel better about themselves, and become more engaged in school and their communities around them.

Though the conference focused on the integration of sexuality, education, and technology -- and these highlights are several of many at the conference --  it was mighty hard to miss the notion that personal connections are still at the heart of all great sexuality education.

See also: the sex::tech Disability Panel