With Pleasure: Improving Sex Education for Adults with Intellectual Disabilities

I’ve just landed in Adelaide where I am about to embark on the project of a lifetime. I have had the privilege of being granted a 2025 Churchill Fellowship to research sex education for adults with intellectual disabilities. I am learning from Australia, Norway, Sweden and Germany with a view to adapting and adopting my findings for the UK context. Countries like Australia are leading the world in co-developing and implementing this work, and I can’t wait to learn from them. 

The Problem 

Adults with intellectual disabilities often navigate experiences of intimacy with little to no support, and the implications of this are wide-ranging and profoundly negative. Disabled sexuality becomes worthy of discussion when it is a ‘problem’ in the context of safeguarding, but rarely in the context of pleasure, exploration and connection. Sex education for these adults is therefore inadequate, purporting to focus on ideals of safety with an infantilising (and unrealistic) emphasis on abstinence. In fact all sex education has historically relied on cis-heteronormative, patriarchal, colonial and ableist knowledge. Dominant cultural portrays of sexuality imagine pleasure to be the privilege of cis-gender, white, thin, heterosexual, non-disabled individuals (Tepper, 2000) and therefore pleasure is not recognised as a right for marginalised populations and subsequently has not been adapted for a differently-abled lens. 

It should go without saying that many adults with intellectual disabilities can be supported to lead healthy, exciting, meaningful sexual lives if the right education is accessible. In fact, many from the disabled community has commented that it is remarkable how dull and unimaginative a non-disabled sex life can appear given the disproportionate focus on penetration and phallic ejaculation, and the over-reliance on the main erogenous zones (three guesses what …) However, the sexuality of adults with intellectual disability is approached from a pathologising framework (Myers & Miller, 2007) where they are either infantilised as asexual infants in need of protection or demonised as sexually perverse, incapable of appropriate expressions of intimacy; in both cases lacking capacity to consent. As a result, adults with intellectual disabilities do not receive appropriate support to realise their right to positive sexual wellbeing and are left unprepared to navigate the complex architecture of intimacy. 

The Solutions

During my research in Australia I will visit 25 organisations and speak with over 100 experts from professionals ranging from experts-by-experience, sexologists, counsellors, occupational therapists, sex and relationship therapists, developmental educators, informal carers, researchers, academics, authors, life coaches, support workers, workshop facilitators, lawyers, and sexual health clinicians (to name a few). All of these people are making exceptional progress in this field and throughout my trip I will be offering my reflections on the emerging themes of this work (see my website for more information). 

My Project

I believe that sex should be about pleasure and wellness not about shame and fear. For too long have marginalized communities learnt about sex from the vantage point of abuse, discrimination, coercion and control, and for too long have disabled people been disempowered from access to basic knowledge, tools, and support in this area. It is time that we accept that everyone has the right to sex that is pleasurable, silly, messy, intimate, and FUN (not necessarily at the same time.) On the Australian leg of my journey I am visiting Adelaide, Melbourne, Gippsland, Canberra, Sydney, Ballina, Brisbane and Perth and in 2026 I will continue my journey in Stockholm, Malmo (Sweden) and Oslo (Norway), while also learning from sexperts in Berlin and Cologne. 

My goal is threefold 1) to develop a guidebook to support formal and informal support networks to design, deliver, and embed intellectual disability-accessible sex education, 2) to produce a podcast series made for and with experts in the field to disseminate my findings in another more accessible format and 3) to co-design an organisation solely dedicated to this work in the UK. It is an ambitious project, my brain and heart are already overflowing with insights shared (not to mention gratitude, inspiration and the increasingly overwhelming to-do list) and it is only day 6 so we will see how we go, but I am excited about the weeks, months and lifetime to come. 

References 

Tepper, M. (2000) Sexuality and disability: The missing discourse of pleasure. Sexuality and Disability, 18(4), 283–290. USA. 

Myers, S., Milner, J. (2007). Sexual issues in social work. The Policy Press. Bristol, UK

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