The ISEX curriculum

“Sex-Ed across cultures” is a teaching curriculum offering training tools for the promotion of comprehensive sexual education with young people, while fostering their empowerment processes related to intimacy and sexuality. 

This manual is addressed for professionals who are involved in work with young people: educators, teachers,  activists, sexual or emotional life educators or people involved in social or youth work. It is also addressed to young adults themselves, if they wish to share this manual in their community. There is no need to be an expert on gender or sexuality to try out or propose the implementation of the activities, on the contrary everyone is called to take part in a personal learning process.

WHY? 

This handbook is the result of the attempt to overcome a contemporary challenge, namely the lack of high quality, positive, curriculum-based comprehensive sexual education in school. Indeed, although sexual education should be a part of the secondary school, in many European countries it is not systematically implemented, or it mainly focuses on the negative aspects of sexuality while neglecting important issues (e.g. cultural aspects of sexuality, gender and sexual orientation, development of social and emotional skills). 

Moreover, while relationships represent the most important factor of our happiness and wellbeing, we tend to believe that they emerge just naturally and not as something to be learned. Few children receive adequate knowledge and preparation for their lives that will empower them to take control and make clear decisions about their sexuality and to build safe and healthy relationships. 

With this in mind, we propose a curriculum that aims at building up the capacity of professionals and providing them with practical tools and reliable resources, help them to develop skills  to promote positive sexual education.