Youth Voices on Comprehensive Sexuality Education. A Comparative Study on School-Based CSE in Italy and Chile

Sexuality education is implemented as part of the school curriculum in many countries worldwide. In recent decades, there has been an increase in the design and implementation of ‘comprehensive’ programs within formal education, marking a shift in focus from anatomy and prevention towards a rights-based approach. This includes elements such as positive sexualities and respectful relationships, young people’s rights, participation, and agency, gender equality and power relations, and sexual and reproductive health and rights (Miedema et al., 2020). The global landscape of CSE implementation is highly heterogeneous, with some countries displaying long traditions and others still being far from its adoption in formal education. In this context, some countries such as Italy and Chile have succeeded in advancing valuable CSE initiatives without national legislations explicitly supporting them, highlighting the need for evidence to better understand these cases. Furthermore, while qualitative research is gaining relevance in the field, limited attention has been paid – both globally and in academic scholarship – to the perspectives and voices of youth in relation to sexuality education. This is particularly problematic given that they are the intended beneficiaries of these programs (Allen, 2007b, 2011a; Jones, 2011; Le Mat, 2017). This investigation sets out to explore young people’s perceptions of their experience with school-based CSE programs in Chile and Italy, and to analyse the main implementation challenges in each case. It adopts a qualitative, case study design (Merriam, 1998), using photovoice and focus groups as the two main data collection methods, both of which have been proven advantageous and are widely used in youth relationships and sexuality research (Allen, 2003; Ringrose et al., 2013). The sample includes one middle school per country that is currently, or was recently, implementing a CSE program with students in 8th grade (13 to 14- year-olds). Results reveal a dissonance between ambitious CSE program goals and their empirical application in the classroom. Students report insufficient teacher training, which manifests on biases and a lack of connection with their concerns, alongside pervasive adultcentrism, heteronormativity, and structural contradictions between CSE objectives and broader school cultures. Moreover, youth call for CSE to be grounded in critical thinking, with engaging and participatory teaching and learning methods – approaches that remain surprisingly still broadly absent from their classroom experiences. As such, findings highlight the need to focus on several pedagogical areas, understood both as the ways in which young people wish to learn, and how aspects of program format influence the realization of this goal. Students want to be considered legitimate, agentic subjects, capable of developing critical skills to reflect and make informed decisions about their wellbeing. Finally, findings underscore the centrality of critical and feminist pedagogies, as well as progressive and democratic educational approaches, in enhancing the effectiveness of CSE. they also emphasise the importance of adopting whole-school approaches in line with bioecological models and cultural historical theories of learning, which expand the understanding of CSE beyond the classroom setting.