‘… a huge monster that should be feared and not done’: Lessons learned in sexuality education classes in South Africa

Abstract

Research has foregrounded the way in which heterosexual practices for many young people are not
infrequently bound up with violence and unequal transactional power relations. The Life Orientation
sexuality education curriculum in South African schools has been viewed as a potentially valuable
space to work with young people on issues of reproductive health, gender and sexual norms and
relations. Yet, research has illustrated that such work may not only be failing to impact on more
equitable sexual practices between young men and women, but may also serve to reproduce the
very discourses and practices that the work aims to challenge. Cultures of violence in youth sexuality
are closely connected to prevailing gender norms and practices which, for example, render women
as passive victims who are incapable of exercising sexual agency and men as inherently sexually
predatory. This paper analyses the talk of Grade 10 learners in nine diverse schools in two South
African provinces, the Eastern Cape and the Western Cape, to highlight what ‘lessons’ these young
people seem to be learning about sexuality in Life Orientation classes. We find that these lessons
foreground cautionary, negative and punitive messages, which reinforce, rather than challenge,
normative gender roles. ‘Scare’ messages of danger, damage and disease give rise to presumptions
of gendered responsibility for risk and the requirement of female restraint in the face of the assertion
of masculine desire and predation. We conclude that the role which sexuality education could play in
enabling young women in particular to more successfully negotiate their sexual relationships to serve
their own needs, reproductive health and safety, is undermined by regulatory messages directed at
controlling young people, and young women in particular – and that instead, young people’s sexual
agency has to be acknowledged in any processes of change aimed at gender equality, anti-violence,
health and well-being.