‘Nobody ever told you, “actually, this feels great”’: Religion informed sexual health education and barriers to developing sexual literacy.

Abstract

Sexual literacy is ‘a form of critical thinking focused on the knowledge, skills and actions needed to achieve sexual [health] across the life course’ (Herdt et al., 2021, p. 3). However, the cultivation of sexual literacy may be hindered by noncritical, sex-negative, religious, and moral elements prevalent in both formal and informal approaches to sexual education. Developing sexual literacy is crucial, especially for women as we continue to grapple with sexual inequality and injustices such as sexual violence against women because it allows people to expand their skills to become critical and develop an engaged awareness of discourses and sociocultural constructions of gender and sexuality. There is very little research adult women's reflections on their religion informed formal and informal sexual education and its relationship to sexual literacy. This research which is part of a larger doctoral project seeks to understand how sexual education from a religious perspective related to women's sexual health and wellbeing throughout their life. The topic was explored through eighteen semi structured interviews with women between the ages of 26–68 from Northern Ireland. The research shows that formal and informal sexual health education lacked comprehensive instruction on sexual interaction and did not equip my participants with skills and knowledge to become sexually literate. Instead, the way that gender and sexuality was presented to them, created barriers to developing sexual literacy.