Madeline (00:01): Hello and welcome to SHE SOARS. Her Voice. Her Rights.

Amal (00:05): We are CARE Canada’s Youth Champions, a group of young people across Canada who are passionate advocates for Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights (SRHR).

Lauren (00:13): We’re excited to discuss and raise awareness about young women’s rights and choices in Kenya, Uganda and Zambia.

Amal (00:20): Together, we will explore how these global issues connect to our lives as Canadian youth and discover ways in which we can all take action.

Lauren (00:27): We will also talk about the SHE SOARS* project, which improves access to health and education, which are areas we want to see change in.

Everyone (00:34): Join us!

Madeline (00:40): Hello everyone and welcome back to another episode of the SHE SOARS podcast. Last episode we were joined by Sithembile Sakala from Zambia to discuss sexual education (sex ed) in the SHE SOARS partner countries and what the SHE SOARS project is doing in terms of sexual education . Now, as a sort of counterpart to that last episode, we are very pleased to be joined today by Jessica Wood to talk more about sex education in the Canadian context. So Jessica is a research specialist for the Sex Information & Education Council of Canada (SIECCAN). In this role she conducts research related to sexual health education and develops guidelines for educators, healthcare providers, and policy-makers. Jessica has an extensive research background in sexual health and relationships. So welcome, Jessica. We are so happy to have you today.

Jessica (01:31): Thank you for having me. It’s a pleasure to be here and meet all of you and discuss sexual health education in Canada with this awesome, awesome project and great group of people.

Amal (01:40): Thank you so much for joining us. So to start off, could you please elaborate a bit on your background and shed some light on the work that SIECCAN is doing across Canada?

Jessica (01:50): I did all of my educational training at the University of Guelph but I took time off in between each of my degrees to work in community organizations. I have a Master’s in Family Relations and Human Development and a PhD in Applied Social Psychology. And in both cases I focused my research on sexual health relationships, sexual motivation and how people are satisfied, or not satisfied, or navigate different types of relationships like consensually, non-monogamous partnerships. And then once I graduated I did a part-time post-doc at Guelph and York University and that’s when I started working with SIECCAN. So in 2018 I joined SIECCAN to help work on the Canadian Guidelines for Sexual Health Education and I’ve been here ever since. So with SIECCAN I do research, consultation, resource development and get to work with amazing people across different fields and sectors.

Jessica (02:44): I love this job. I feel very fortunate. In terms of what SIECCAN does across Canada, SIECCAN is a not-for-profit organization that seeks to promote Sexual and Reproductive Health in Canada. We work with educators, health professionals, community organizations, governments and others and we create resources to help build the knowledge and capacity of the educators and others who are providing sexual health education. So we have the 2019 Canadian Guidelines for Sexual Health Education that provide guidance for anyone who’s doing sex ed in Canada, whether that’s in schools or in healthcare professions or in community organizations. We just released guidelines and benchmarks focused on integrating gender-based violence prevention within school-based sexual health education. We’re in the process of creating national comprehensive sexual health education benchmarks. So specifying the kinds of topics that young people should learn about at different ages and grades to try to provide some consistent access to comprehensive sex ed across the country. And we have some awesome resources that we will be releasing in the summer focused on the sexual health promotion of autistic youth. We also conduct our own research and national surveys. So we do a lot of different and interconnected activities all focused on sexual health education.

Lauren (03:59): Awesome. Thank you. We’re excited to learn more about that. So to give our listeners some background context, what are the main themes and topics currently covered in sex education in schools across Canada? I know it’s a bit different across provinces, but if you could speak to the national picture that would be great.

Jessica (04:14): Yeah, I think you bring up a really important point. All provinces and territories have some form of sexual health education, whether that’s in their health and physical education program, like family and social curricula, or a more fulsome sexuality program. It’s there. You know, as you mentioned, there’s also significant variation across the country in terms of what youth have access to. It varies across regions, school boards and can even vary within schools depending on the resources, whether or not teachers have support and training and whether they feel comfortable with it. And another kind of caveat is that what we see in curricula often doesn’t present a full picture of what’s going on in the classroom and what students experience, right? There’s a lot of awesome educators that can take what’s in the curricula and expand on that and provide wonderful context and do this in a way that meets the needs of the people in their class.

Jessica (05:00): And then there’s others who are less comfortable teaching and may not be able to provide as much context and nuance for those students. There have been researchers and organizations that have examined curricula across the country systematically and generally we see that topics like puberty, safer sex and healthy relationships are incorporated across the board, so across all areas or all regions. However, there is more variability when it comes to topics like gender, gender identity and expression, and understanding gender norms and stereotypes, which is very important for gender-based violence prevention. There is more variation when it comes to sexual orientation and information on all pregnancy options, so including information on abortion, information on pleasure, sexual rights and values. Sexual rights and values seems to be something quite absent from a lot of the specifically elementary curricula. And when our gender-based violence prevention benchmarks, we position this as a really key topic strand that you should be learning about throughout the entirety of their education.

Jessica (06:02): Sexual health education should really focus on human rights as a fundamental component of gender-based violence prevention because that’s in line with international human rights documents. It helps youth become aware of their rights and understand they have human rights related to sexual health. You know, another piece of this that I think is important to the Canadian context is that we need culturally responsive sexual health education that incorporates and supports programs created and led by Indigenous peoples and programs that incorporate information on the impact of colonialism on things like gender-based violence and sexual health. So there’s calls in final report for the National Inquiry of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls that are focused on ensuring that curricula is developed in partnership with Indigenous peoples and that it includes Indigenous history and perspectives. And while that might be done in some educational curricula, in some fields and some areas, we haven’t seen as much with sexual health education.

Jessica (07:01): So in our recent survey with youth, 54 per cent said that they had never learned about Indigenous perspectives on sexuality and gender. And so this was out of 35 topics. That was the highest percentage where they said they had just not learned anything. So I think there is definitely progress being made; we see more of a focus on areas like consent and developing skills for healthy relationships and communication, and some movement towards digital literacy related to sexuality. But in terms of ensuring that sexual health education is comprehensive and that it meets the needs of all young people, there’s still a lot of work to do. We may talk about this a little bit more, but ensuring that sexual health education is intersectional, that it addresses the needs of youth that haven’t had their voices and needs incorporated into sex ed, that it includes more of the enhancing aspects of sexuality or incorporates pleasure. Youth want to learn about these things. They want to learn about pleasure. There’s a lot of research documenting the benefits of learning about pleasure, especially for the prevention of violence. And so we need to think about the areas I think that aren’t being covered and start covering them and then think about the areas that are being covered and whether they’re inclusive, up-to-date and addressing the needs of young people.

Madeline (08:14): Thanks so much Jessica. That’s all really interesting to hear about. In terms of SIECCAN’s process for developing curriculum guidelines, do you mind briefly walking us through that and speaking a bit to how youth, parents and educators are engaged in the process of developing those guidelines?

Jessica (08:34): Yeah, of course. And I think that’s a great question because I think it helps people to know, where does all this come from and how is it put together? We do a very fulsome consultation and engagement process. And there’s a few different ways that we do this with all of our major projects, especially when we’re developing these larger documents that are about best practices, guidelines, benchmarks and these national approaches. So we develop expert working groups to help guide us in terms of content development, up-to-date practices, language and making sure that we have representation from different groups of people or people who work with different groups of youth, for example. A wide range of people in the field of sexual health education, sexual health promotion, people with lived experience. We have youth members on these groups, some from youth-led organizations.

Jessica (09:24): So that’s one primary way that we involve educators and youth in our projects. Another way is that we conduct research. So we survey people who are working in these areas to ask about best practices and needs. We’ve done national surveys of parents where we ask them how they felt about sexual health education in the schools, what topics they wanted introduced and when they wanted those topics introduced. We also just finished a survey of 3,500 youth aged 16 to 24 where we asked them about their sexual health education needs and experiences. And this survey and data will be really critical in helping us inform our national comprehensive sexual health education benchmarks. So we also conduct focus groups and discussions with youth to help inform our resources. And we also work with partners who have youth advisory boards. Then we also do reviews of the literature so that what we are recommending is evidence-based.

Jessica (10:20): It’s up-to-date and it draws from a broad range of sources. And finally we evaluate our resources too. So there’s a development process and then there’s the evaluation of our projects as well as our resources. We try to determine: How are they helping? How are they working? Some resources that are more geared towards youth may be evaluated in more of a pilot when there are resources that youth might be accessing themselves. And we make sure that we ask people: How are you using these? What can we do to make more resources to help you? So this is an approach that we take with the development of all our big projects. And then thinking about the 2019 Canadian Guidelines for Sexual Health Education. That document includes these nine core principles that define and inform comprehensive sex ed. So we suggest that these are principles that should inform and be respected in any sexual health education in Canada.

Jessica (11:16): And that includes things like sexual health education is accessible to all people. It promotes human rights. It’s scientifically accurate. It’s broadly-based. It’s inclusive of 2SLGBTQ+ people. It promotes gender equality. It incorporates a balanced approach. It’s responsive to emerging issues and provided by educators who have the knowledge and skills deliver sex ed. And we’ve conducted research on people’s agreements with these core principles. We’ve done a parent survey, we’ve done a youth survey and we’ve also asked people who work in the field. So people who are experts in sex ed. And so far across all these groups, especially with parents and youth, there is overwhelming agreement that sex ed should be inclusive. It should promote gender equality and aim to prevent gender-based violence. It should aim to reduce homophobia and transphobia. It should incorporate both prevention and the positive aspects of sexuality. So most people in our research when we’re talking about parents and youth and people who work in the field are in agreement with these fundamental principles, but there are some people who are more neutral about these ideas, but it’s really important to note that there are very few that actually seem to disagree in these particular surveys. So I think that’s a really overarching view of how we develop this, how we evaluate it, and then also, okay, we’ve got these things now what are people thinking of this and how are they using them?

Amal (12:34): Thank you so much. It’s very interesting to see how you guys really develop the guidelines and incorporate all the target groups. So I know like things are always changing, especially in the education system. I know in Ontario the sex ed curriculum has changed a few times from what I’ve seen in the news. Have you noticed any really big shifts in sex ed curriculum in Canada in the past 10 to 15 years? What gaps should be filled and what changes would you like to see made?

Jessica (12:59): I think that’s such a great question and I know often people are familiar with all of the changes around the Ontario curricula and the repeals of that, and then going back to a curricula that was very similar to what the repealed one was in the first place with a few significant changes. But if we’re taking that larger overarching picture, I think sexual health education has focused on issues related to problem prevention, right? Like preventing unwanted pregnancies, preventing sexually transmitted infections, which is one component of the goals of sex ed. And the other side of that for comprehensive sex ed is really enhancing sexual health, focusing on relationships, focusing on communication and thinking about consent and thinking about pleasure and the enhancing aspects of sexual health. And I think that piece has historically been missing. And I would absolutely like to see a shift made in that sense to see more of those pieces incorporated while we’re talking about the enhancing aspects of sexuality in relation to self-esteem and incorporating things around body image and trying to make it a more fulsome and holistic approach to sexuality rather than just, here’s your safer sex materials, here’s how we prevent pregnancies.

Jessica (14:15): But making sure that it is more holistic. So I do think we have seen a bit of a shift towards recognizing the importance of developing skills to build and maintain interpersonal relationships, including sexual and romantic partnerships. I think there has been a recognition and integration somewhat of gender and sexual diversity in some regions, but this differs and whether those topics are covered extensively or early enough is a completely other story. So I would like to see the needs of 2SLGBTQI+ youth integrated more thoroughly into programs. I would like to see more of an intersectional approach applied to sexual health education so that the needs of all youth are actually addressed. And another piece is making it a priority. A lot of the time, in some areas it’s done towards the end of the year. There may not be as much time allotted to it.

Jessica (15:08): And I think having more structural support in place so that there’s time, there’s extra teachers available or there are funds available to bring in other organizations who already have that expertise in that training is really important. And I think that is a structural thing that administration can work to provide that. Young people all often say that they want to learn these things from people who are experts, people who are open and knowledgeable. Sometimes that might be their teacher and sometimes they may be more comfortable with an external person coming in, especially for certain topic, and if they are in a classroom where their teacher may have relationships with their family outside of the classroom like in a rural or remote area. So having more structural support to bring in external partners and developing those relationships with external partners is another thing I would really like to see as well.

Lauren (16:02): Yeah, thanks so much for sharing those ideas. I didn’t even think about a lot of those things, but that makes total sense as something that would be needed in the curriculum. Okay. So you’ve touched on this a little bit already, but I’ll ask it in case there’s anything else you would like to add. So could you explain the role and importance of intersectionality in sex ed curriculums in Canada and also touching on gender-based violence, which is a big thing that’s included in the SHE SOARS curriculum in our partner countries?

Jessica (16:24): That’s a great question. So I think intersectionality is a really good framework or tool for understanding how different systems of inequality intersect, come together to create different dynamics or impact people differently. So systems like racism, sexism, transphobia and homophobia, can make people more vulnerable to discrimination and harm, right? There’s nothing inherent about a person’s identity like their skin color, their gender, their sexual orientation class, et cetera, that are the source of vulnerability. But it is the way that society and our culture devalues particular identities that results in certain groups being marginalized and therefore more likely to be discriminated or harmed. So using an intersectional approach is a key recommendation in our gender-based violence prevention, sexual health education guidelines. And to be effective, we need to use intersectional and anti-racist perspective. So that means looking at the ways that these different social systemic factors contribute to gender-based violence.

Jessica (17:27): How does the ongoing impact of colonialism and racism and ableism, all of these things and having these kinds of specific sexist or misogynistic beliefs, how does that make someone at a greater or less risk of experiencing or perpetrating gender-based violence? And an intersectional approach also allows us to look at the different sexual health education needs of different groups of students and to start looking at the root causes of gender-based violence, which students say they want to learn about. They want to unpack these things, they want to start to break them down so that they can advocate for change in their lives and in their communities. But we know that sexual health education has often been taught not from this lens. It’s been taught from a lens that is oriented toward more heterosexual students, towards cisgender students. And discussions of racism or culture or disability are often omitted from those discussions in those lessons. And sexual health education hasn’t often incorporated the needs of Queer and Trans youth, Indigenous, Black and students of color or neurodiverse youth or youth with disabilities. So an intersectional approach I think is very key to help us recognize that youth with different intersecting identities have different needs and experiences. But again, recognizing that the specific identities and social characteristics are not the problem. These systems of oppression that are interconnected and place people at greater or less risk of experiencing or perpetrating gender-based violence.

Madeline (18:55): Thanks for that answer. There was a lot of really interesting information there. I think it’ll give us a really good foundation too in the second half of this conversation that we’re going to have between the three of us to talk about the similarities or connections between sex ed curricula in Canada and in Kenya, Uganda and Zambia as part of the SHE SOARS project. And everything you were saying definitely makes me reflect on how little intersectionality there was in the sex ed that I had growing up in Canada. Before we wrap up, can you maybe talk a little bit about how you think youth can take initiative to learn more about sex ed in Canada and get involved in advocacy if that’s something they’re interested in?

Jessica (19:38): I love ending on this question and especially just given the context of your projects. A lot of our resources and documents are geared towards educators and policy-makers, but that doesn’t mean that students can’t use them to advocate for better sexual health education, right? Student voices are so powerful. Policy-makers take note when students organize and say what they want. You can take the information that you know is already out there to the people who can make changes and let them know: Here’s all this information that’s correlated and it’s what we want and here’s a document that’s telling you how to do these things that’s outlining for you how to do it. And we want this. That can be very powerful to create change. And whether that is organized through different avenues in the school, different groups in the school, talking with parents, with school boards or student advocacy groups, youth can also become involved in youth advisory boards for community organizations.

Jessica (20:34): And I’m not sure how familiar you are with Action Canada for Sexual Health and Rights, but they have a youth advisory board. They do a lot of awesome advocacy work in Canada related to sexual health and rights, but also sexual health education specifically. So I would encourage young people to check them out as well. And you know, one thing that SIECCAN does is we like to bring together all this information and have it in manageable pieces so that people can just look at a document and say: Here’s all the evidence and this is why we’re making this recommendation. Young people can also take that model and apply it themselves to their specific area. If you’re talking about in your school, you’d like to see a specific change, okay, you’ve got these national guidelines, but also you can see in our school what’s some information we can gather and put together to say, here’s why this particular change is needed, what kind of reporting is going on, what kind of incidents are going on in your specific school. And you can gather that information and say, listen, this is a problem. We’ve identified this as a problem and here are some national guidelines that show how we can make change. And it provides all the evidence for why that is a really good way to go. And you can push that forward and using the student voice. And I think that can be incredibly powerful.

Amal (21:44): Yeah. Thank you so much for sharing about ways youth can take action and engage in advocacy. So that wraps up our episode for today. Thank you so much for joining us today, Jessica. It’s been really lovely to meet you and hear about your insights and the work SIECCAN is doing.

Jessica (22:02): Thank you for having me and thank you for doing this wonderful project and getting these wonderful messages out.

Amal (22:08): Yes, thank you so much. So stay tuned for part two of this episode where we will discuss what we’ve learned today from Jessica and from our last episode with Sithembile, where we will draw on comparisons between sex ed in Canada and the SHE SOARS partner countries and why this matters to us as Canadian youth.

Amal (22:28): Thanks for listening to SHE SOARS. If you liked this episode, please share it on social media, connect with us in the comments or give us a like.

Lauren (22:36): Make sure to catch our next episode by subscribing to our channel and following us wherever you get your podcasts.

Madeline (22:42): Follow @carecanada on Instagram for updates on our show and the project.

Lauren (22:47): SHE SOARS stands for Sexual and reproductive Health and Economic empowerment supporting Out-of-school Adolescent girls’ Rights and Skills in Kenya, Uganda and Zambia.

Madeline (22:57): The project is funded by Global Affairs Canada. Check out our global partner organizations:

Amal (23:03): Youth Coalition for Sexual and Reproductive Rights, the Center for Reproductive Rights and Restless Development for even more project updates.

Lauren (23:11): Thanks again for listening. Until next time!