With pleasure - Sex education for adults with intellectual disabilities

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...

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...

  Connecting Across Continents Insights from Australian Fellows I was honoured to attend the  60th Anniversary Convention  for Fellows of the Winston Churchill Trust in Melbourne. The Australian Trust, and one in New Zealand, were started at the same time as the Churchill Fellowship in the UK. The convention was a  celebration of new ideas . It showed me the amazing work happening across Australia and beyond. Talks and Ideas The conference started with a talk by  Dr Susan Carland  (VIC 2019) about Winston Churchill’s life and legacy. The final speech was by  Jeremy Soames , Churchill’s grandson. The weekend included  difficult topics , such as: AI (artificial intelligence) in schools Clown doctors in aged care Women working in trades Preventing homicide Even though none of the sessions were exactly about my research – improving  sex education for adults with intellectual disabilities  – I left full of ideas and inspiration. AI and Sex Ed...