“People can know about basics stuffs naturally or without help from other”: Bangladeshi Young Men’s Experiences of Sexual Health Education

• In Event: Public health

Proposal

This study has sought to shed light on the dearth of research on sexual health education in Bangladesh bringing forward young men’s experiences, views, narratives, recollections, and perceptions around sexual health education. Using social constructionism and poststructuralism, this study addresses the research questions: How did Bangladeshi young men receive sexual health education during adolescence, navigating sex and sexuality? How did they interpret their experiences? How did their narratives reproduce and/or disrupt dominant discourses related to sexual health education, including discourses around sexuality, teenagerhood, masculinity, and manhood? Based on the qualitative data collected from nine in-depth Skype interviews with young men in Bangladesh, nine themes emerged. These themes illustrate - how participants received sexual health education with the help of peers, pornography, the Internet, media, parents, schools, and religion. This study also reveals that what they learned about sex and sexuality from these sources was often gendered (e.g., reproduced hegemonic masculinity), sexist (e.g., undermined the need for girls’ consent), and naturalized the idea of sex and sexuality as dangerous (e.g., through a focus on sexually infected disease prevention). This study identified dominant discourses around sexual health education, which are intertwined with social institutions, such as the school; it also illustrates instances which reproduced and disrupted these dominant discourses. Some participants embraced dominant discourses while others disrupted them, and some contradicted themselves. Participants also proposed mixed ways of improving sex education / sexual health education in Bangladesh, especially through designing sex education curriculum. The study draws the attention of the parents, curriculum designers, teachers, policymakers, service providers to young people, and scholars from the Global South to consider these innovations as food for thought to ensure young people’s right to sex education / sexual health education.

Keywords: sex education, Foucauldian Discourse Analysis (FDA), social constructionism, sexuality, masculinity, Bangladesh, boyhood.

Author

• Tauhid Hossain Khan, Ph.D candidate, University of Waterloo