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Who decides what’s good for you? How state philosophy shapes sex education.

Scroll down for plain English version A few days ago I sat down with academic researchers tasked with evaluating the VIP project - a Swedish adaptation of the Australian sex education programme SLRR. A conversation that was meant to be about sexual health ended up focused on the nature of the state and this made me reflect on how philosophies of the state shape the welfare that it provides.  The SLRR (sexual lives and respectful relationships) programme was a multi-week sex ed programme designed in Australia by people with intellectual disabilities for people with intellectual disabilities. It’s built on the principle of ‘nothing about us without us’ recognising that adults with intellectual disabilities are experts in their own lives. Swedish and Norwegian states adopted and adapted this programme and disseminated it across both countries, the Swedish model decentralised across municipalities and the Norwegian model centralised and adopted by NGOs. The Swedish evaluators of VIP re...
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Society’s Chokehold: How Our Values Shape Sex Education

Scroll down for Easy English version  A bus driver made me move to the back of the bus the other day because my conversation was “distracting him”. I was on the phone with my mum having a friendly debate about the ethics of strangulation porn (God love her). She’d listened to Woman’s Hour discuss how “there is no safe way to strangle” because restricting oxygen flow carries serious consequences: brain injury, aspiration pneumonia, loss of consciousness, memory impairment and death. What struck her was how normalised choking has become among young people—and how little information is available to support informed consent. What struck me was how easily hard-line language and possible research bias could stigmatise consensual BDSM practices. UK data makes clear this isn’t a fringe issue. A YouGov poll found that one in eight young adults (18–29) have been choked during sex, rising to around 15% of young women. A third of young women and a fifth of young men said a partner had held the...
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Make it make sense! Honouring Sensory Needs in Intimate Settings

Scroll down for Easy English I am writing this from the Great Barrier Reef where I have spent the last four days doing a mixture of swimming with sea turtles and enjoying the East Australian sun. I am about half way through my fellowship and this excursion has given me the time to reflect on my learnings so far. During my work with organisations across Adelaide, Melbourne, Gippsland and Sydney a theme that keeps resurfacing is the centrality of sensory needs in the intimate lives of people with intellectual disabilities (PWID). It feels obvious, yet it remains largely absent from mainstream sex education that if we ignore the sensory body, we miss a fundamental part of how people experience pleasure, safety and connection. At Thrive Rehab in Melbourne, occupational therapists recognise that PWID often experience the external world differently to neurotypical people, with everyday noises intolerably loud, certain materials unbearable to wear, and small changes in temperatures intensely...
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