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Social health as core to sex education

Scroll down for plain English I’ve arrived in Malmo and already been invited to a queer BBQ, a drag pub quiz and sunbathed naked by the sea pool - Sweden is treating me well! I also met with academic Dr Julia Bahner from Lund University where our conversation introduced me to a new concept: social health. Social health is a dimension of overall wellbeing which stems from connection and community.  Promotion of social health requires investment in the skills that enable someone to access and participate in such communities at local, national and international levels. These skills, which include understanding norms of social engagement, emoting ‘appropriately’, shared idiosyncrasies and language etc are often taken for granted but for adults with cognitive disabilities they often need to be learnt. Understanding the rules of social engagement extend far beyond manners and pleasantries, and involves recognising when and how to modify behaviour for different parts of your social ecosys...
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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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