Sex Education and the Problematization of Teenage Pregnancy: a Genealogy of Law and Governance

Abstract

This essay provides a theoretical examination of the law regulating sex education and focuses in particular on the way in which it responds to teenage pregnancies. Adopt ing a post-structural approach, it seeks to demystify the 'common-sense' political consensus in Britain that the current rate of teenage pregnancies is a 'problem', by examining how they are problematized by the social constructions, and moral and economic values and calculations within dominant political discourses. It then demonstrates how these constructions translate into conflicting solutions, or pro grammes, of health education and moral education. In demonstrating how these pro grammes are deployed to govern child sexuality, this essay identifies a variety of techniques of government, such as how different meanings and attributes are given to words like 'children' and 'parents' and 'health' and 'biology'; how the knowledge and expertise of health professionals are legitimized within a particular location and how the curriculum structure itself performs a particular function. In examining the role of law throughout this process, this essay demonstrates how the law concerning sex education operates outside of a repressive juridical model and is able to connect the aspirations and aims of the state with more positive uses of power.

The Politics of Sex Education Policy in England and Wales and The Netherlands since the 1980s

“…Furthermore parents have been given the right to withdraw their children from sex education lessons, regardless of the wishes of the child. Thus, while in the health context children are seen as independent and potentially sexual patients, in an educational context the view that they are sexual innocents has prevailed (Monk, 1998). As Harris (1996) has pointed out, there must be doubt as to whether these provisions would hold if tested by the European Court of Human Rights.…”

Picturing Sex Education: Notes on the politics of visual stratification

“…Following Michel Foucault, discursive readings of late 20th century ''sex education'' have been offered as a matter of routine (see, for example, Harrison & Hillier, 1999;Irvine, 2000;Johnson, 1996;Middleton, 1998;Monk, 1998;Thorogood, 1992Thorogood, , 2000Tien, 1994;Wagener, 1998;Willig, 1999). What interests me are the ways curricular strategies are deployed to articulate a discourse of pedagogy against its many discursive opposites (such as paternalism, foundationalism, and authoritarianism).…”

Controlling passion? A review of recent developments in British sex education

“…For others, it is the role of this discourse in urging self-discipline and delimiting sexual desire that is of particular interest. This particularly insightful strand of academic writing uses Foucault's work to argue that sex education is part of a broader shift in social control (see, in particular, Monk 1998, Thorogood 2000. In the first volume of The History of Sexuality Foucault argues that, in the eighteenth century, the state began to see and treat citizens as a population, a discrete body whose growth and decline should be charted and controlled through the new science of demography (1990, p. 25).…”