Miriam: And why sex ed? Why not something else?

Christina:

Ah, sex ed, well, I mean, I could start by saying there was an education reform in 2005. Where Quebec said that, “You know, there is a problem with sex ed. We need to reform it. We need to make it better. It can't just be in one subject matter it has to be all throughout the curriculum.” So there was this magical idea that sex ed. was going to magically appear in every classroom, but unfortunately, they didn’t actually think about the mechanism of implementation of this reform. So you had teachers who were in agreement and said that, “Yes, sex ed needs to be taught. I don’t want to do it, or I don’t know how, or I don’t feel comfortable.” Other teachers who really did take it upon themselves, so there was a very, an incongruent sexual health curriculum happening.

And the thing is, is that sex ed was never good. I mean, it was never a really solid class that you walked away feeling like, “Wow, I feel really good about being a lesbian,” or “I feel really good about being a woman,” or “I feel really good about, in my body, I know I feel confident that I can use a condom whenever.” I think that it was a class that most students didn’t take seriously, that it was like a free period where, “Oh, this is the class we get to like throw paper planes around and stuff.” So I think, in a way, the reform is really an interesting opportunity for Head & Hands, who had been doing this type of work for over 40 years, delivering workshops, to design a program that can work in tandem with this reform and actually embody the reform because we want sex ed to be holistic. We want to touch a part of every aspect of the curriculum whether it be social sciences or math, where we can break down statistics just like we can relate issues around communication to paradigms between boys and girls.

So yeah, it was really a great opportunity to infiltrate, you know. And sex ed, because there is a lot also related to public health stats. There’s a rise in STIs amongst youth, especially youths between 15 and 24. Also, we hear stories about teenagers telling us, “Oh, you know I went to go and buy condoms the other day, but I was carded at the depaneur, the clerk said that I was too young, that I needed to be 18.” Which isn’t true at all.

And so, because we don’t necessarily talk about sex in this very open way, that it’s everywhere, we're inundated with sexual imagery and desire, and this ideology, but yet we don’t talk about it, so it allows us to have a certain power over, or not power but anyway, it just creates these misconceptions that are really damaging for people’s self-esteem and the future of their health. When you think that people with HIV, a lot of times, will discover it in their 30s, where they won’t necessarily find out when they’re younger, and it’s a shame anyway that there’s so much silence around these issues. And also, just to validate youth’s experiences, to give them - not a voice, but a chance to just talk and to be listened to.

Miriam: Can you tell me a bit more about the relationship between sex education and media?

Christina:

Yeah, sex education and media. Well, there’s a lot of sex in the media. That’s the first connection that I can think of. Everything from music videos to popular culture, from movies etcetera. There's this theme in media studies right now around the sexualization of girls, and the role of the media. And I find that, in the past, a lot of sex ed. classes would use videos like sex ed videos to like start discussions or whatever. So there’s definitely media within sexuality and also within sex ed classes.

What we try to do is use media to open up discussions instead of just having the media speak, like lecture the students, like in the past, they would show a video about sexual assault let’s say, and then that was it, and then the discussion never really happened. We find that when youth are the ones who are creating the media then there’s a more hands-on feeling to it. They own it, so they’re proud of it, or they’re ashamed of it, or they're something - there's more emotional attachment to it. So it's not just a static thing that’s there.

Again, with the sexualization of youth in media, a lot of them are like, I guess they’re not necessarily aff -- They are affected by it, but they don’t necessarily want to talk about it or think critically about it. It’s just kind of there, it's like you don’t even notice it anymore, it’s just a part of the landscape, so there’s no big deal. But meanwhile, there’s definitely students who are policing each other based on those images, based on like, do I fit in? Don't I? etc... When you think about any movie in Hollywood like, they always have a sex scene and there’s never, I’ve never seen a condom in a movie, like to be honest, there is not really…sexual health doesn’t seem to be a part of real life and public culture it seems.