What Happens When Youth Talk to Youth About Sex

The phrase “comprehensive sexual health education” may strike fear in the heart of some adults, but it’s what many youth in British Columbia want in their education, especially when it comes to knowledge about consent.

Mandatory sexual health education falls under the physical health curriculum in B.C., with phys ed teachers and delivering different aspects of “the talk” starting in Grade 4 all the way up to Grade 10. But unless you take Biology 12, which covers sexual reproduction, that’s the end of sex ed.

After outcry from students and the public over a lack of explicit consent education last year, the Education Ministry announced new, age-appropriate kindergarten to Grade 12 consent curriculum resources were in the works.

But BLUSH, which stands for Bold Learning for Understanding Sexual Health, has already been complimenting existing education by delivering peer-led sex ed workshops in high schools across Richmond, Vancouver and North Vancouver. This past school year alone BLUSH volunteers facilitated 435 workshops.

BLUSH offers three different sex education workshops for kids 13 to 18 years old. Unlike most sex ed lessons, their workshops are created and delivered by 35 volunteer facilitators who, with an age range of 17 to 25 years old, are not much older than the students themselves.

“When I came on board, I started to let those that were facilitating the program make decisions around the direction that we started to go. Because I’m a 52-year-old cis, white dude, I don't know what youth are doing,” said Justin van Westen, co-ordinator and lead educator for BLUSH since 2021.

The Tyee spoke with van Westen and volunteer facilitators Theo Micolino, 24, and Maddie Baker, 17 and going into Grade 12 this fall, about how BLUSH does sex ed differently, the importance of a sex positive education, and how the backlash against sexual health education and queer and trans people shapes the conversations they have with teenagers. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

How does BLUSH work with what kids are learning in schools?

Justin van Westen: The ministry is starting to change around consent content that needs to happen in Grade 11 and 12. We've written a program this summer for Grade 11s which is an experiential gender-based violence program. It'll be about 35 minutes of scenarios and group exercises where they work through what gender-based violence looks like. We are hopefully implementing that starting this fall, and we're hoping to create a Grade 12 consent-based program that will help the youth as they transition out into the real world.

Consent is a driving force in the work that we do. Just this last year we changed our Healthy Relationships Program to a completely bodily autonomy and consent-based program using models of affirmative consent and sex-positive ideologies.

What do you mean by sex positive?

van Westen: Sex positive is creating space for understanding that there is a wide range of sexual engagements that human beings experience, and that there's no absolute one way to engage. Whatever works for individuals, as long as it's done in a consensual way, should not be a problem and should be seen as just the way they experience the world.

Theo Micolino: I always view sex positivity in this context, as being aware that teenagers do have sex. Not all of them will, but it is something that some people do, and it is something they hear about and is a big part of the world. Teenagers deserve accurate information, regardless of whether or not they need it at that given moment. They deserve that kind of accurate information that can help them form healthy relationships and have positive experiences in their life.

Maddie Baker: Within high school it's difficult to talk about sex, especially with adults. People don't really talk about it openly, except maybe within friend groups. So I think what BLUSH does is it creates a space where everyone is there to talk about sex, and you have youth educators, people who are sex-informed, just talking about sex in a very positive way. I think it's refreshing for students, because it reframes sex.

And the emphasis on consent, I think, is really important in high school, because that's the age where kids are starting to develop and they're learning how to interact with other people and build relationships. To have consent be reinforced as an important and integral foundation to a healthy relationship is very important when kids are developing how they want to interact with the world.

What happens when you go into a classroom?

Micolino: The teacher is still there because of our requirements for a teacher to be in the room while we are delivering our program. But I find that teachers tend to take a backseat throughout our workshops, which we do appreciate, because it is important, like Maddie said, for teenagers to feel safe when we're talking about a topic as sensitive and personal as that.

All we really need is for the students to arrange their chairs so we can all sit in a circle. We have a whiteboard we use to write down our information, and we just talk to the kids. Our workshops are all about an hour and 15 minutes long, and we basically just relay that information to the teenagers.

It's as casual an environment as possible while you're still in school. We don't present ourselves as teachers in the classroom, we're just peers there to deliver information.

What are your current workshops?

Micolino: Our consent workshop is typically our Grade 8 workshop. Our Grade 9 workshop is called Safer Sexy and it has to do with safer sex practices, mostly focusing around STIs. Our Grade 10 workshop is media literacy, which has to do with learning how to critically think about sexualized media people are consuming and are exposed to, everything from things that are more graphic in nature, to music videos, songs that have references to sex or dating, to social media that makes people think about their body or other people in certain ways.

van Westen: We're going to be rolling out the gender-based violence program in the 2023-24 school year. And I hope to be able to have a Grade 12 program next year, as well. This summer we’re reworking our Safer Sexy program, bringing it up to date, adding some more STIs as they are in the world today — we have syphilis returning. And we do it in a manner that's not fear-based or risk management-assessment wise. We really make sure that our language destigmatizes STIs and allows people to understand that space a bit better.

Why is it important to destigmatize STIs? They can be dangerous.

van Westen: If they're not taken care of and not addressed, they can be dangerous. We want to destigmatize and take away the fear. Historically we've taught about STIs from a strong fear-based positionality, which also is about abstinence. We're really trying to be more sex positive.

We're not asking anybody to go out and get an STI. Mostly, we're just talking about like, they're not that scary, they're common, and how we can take care of ourselves and our community is through the use of protection, STI testing and being aware of ourselves, especially when we are engaging in sex.

Micolino: STIs, if they go untreated, they can become very dangerous for your health. And we always relay that information to kids. Destigmatizing STIs is talking a lot about how common they are, about how most people at some point are going to get an STI. It doesn't mean that you've made some sort of transgression. Even if you made a mistake and you know you should have used protection and you didn't, it doesn't mean that you're a bad person. It was just a mistake that was made; it's just a public health issue.

And so when you relay that to teenagers, I find teenagers are more likely to actually get tested and be proactive about their sexual health education. I know that when I was in high school, and I didn't know that much about STIs, anytime that I felt like my body was experiencing a symptom that was consistent with an STI, I became terrified. That didn't lead me to get tested, to communicate with my partners, it just made me scared because I was worried that people were going to judge me and that I was going to get in trouble.

Maddie and Theo, how did you get involved as volunteer facilitators?

Baker: I went through sexual health during the pandemic. I had a sexual health class in Grade 8, but then I didn't get a class in Grade 9 and 10 when there is supposed to be mandatory sexual health education.

So I became really interested in bringing something in for my grade. I talked to the head of the physical health education department and he connected me to [BLUSH]. For me, BLUSH has been a way of bringing the tools that I feel would have been really useful in my own journey, to students. And it's a way of making sure that the next generation receives good sexual health education.

Micolino: I'm training to be an elementary school teacher, but I still wanted to be involved in teaching sex ed. I had heard of BLUSH just from being involved in different queer youth groups where BLUSH came in. So I knew that it existed and I wanted to be a part of it. But I didn't graduate high school on time.

So I had to work on getting my Dogwood diploma because at the time, BLUSH only took on people who had graduated high school. By the time that I did that, Justin informed me that he was no longer requiring that people have a high school diploma, because he recognized that there are different circumstances that happen in a person's life that will make them not able to graduate high school on time or at all. And those people still have knowledge to give.

It was really about wanting to make sure that sex education was more inclusive towards queer and trans youth. I also had an interest in making sure that people who have disabilities are still accessing sexual health education, because I'm a neurodivergent person myself and I have just seen how sexual health programming historically has avoided engaging with disabled students.

How do BLUSH facilitators tackle questions about birth control and abortion?

Micolino: At the beginning of our workshops, we talk about youth clinics as a resource that teenagers are able to access. On our website we have a tool where kids can look up the closest youth clinic to either their school or where they live. We tell them that you can access those kinds of services at or through a youth clinic.

We present it as neutrally as possible. I don't want to influence how teenagers who are dealing with a pregnancy manage that decision because it's up to them.

Sex education has always been a political hot topic. But it's really become one lately, especially to the south but definitely here, as well.

van Westen: Oh no, we see it here too.

What are you seeing?

van Westen: There was a protest outside of the BC Teachers Federation, which is just right next door to my office for VCH. They were protesting SOGI123 and identifying any work around trans people as “grooming.”

There's a lot of support for the community here. Then there's these small pockets that want to protest the experiences of other human beings and they want to change those. And that's really hard. All we want to do is make sure that queer and trans kids get to become queer and trans adults.

How do you respond to people who say that parents have a right to keep this information from their kids, or that teaching young people about sexual health is sexualizing them?

Micolino: Because I'm a trans person that's going into education, that's a question I think about a lot. Loved ones in my life have expressed concern that I'm doing this because of the backlash that is possible. But what I say is schools are supposed to be a place of learning and about getting accurate information. It's not sexualizing youth and it's not telling them to have sex. It's about giving them accurate information that is sex positive, so that they're able to make decisions that are healthier for them.

Studies do show that when teenagers are given this kind of accurate information, they're not necessarily having sex earlier, in an unsafer way. They're typically waiting to have sex until they're actually ready to have sex, and going to do so in a way that is safer for themselves and safer for their community.

What is your hopeful vision for sex ed of the future?

Micolino: I think that the path BLUSH is on is really what I want to see. Having a diversity of topics covered and giving teenagers accurate, evidence-based, sex-positive information so they're able to make good decisions. I would like to see it increasingly become more queer and trans inclusive, inclusive of people with different abilities, of neurodivergent people, and seeing this kind of access be furthered so that more and more teenagers are able to access this information.

Baker: BLUSH further making space for different people and voices that aren't necessarily heard in the media or in the way people view sex. Also giving people different understandings of how sex can look, how sex is a very individual experience and there is no universal experience of sex. And I think having that emphasis on consent, on queer inclusion, trans inclusion, as Theo said, and ability inclusion, to create a much more diversified image of what sex is, so kids are able to understand that whatever they experience in terms of consensual sex is right for them.

van Westen: For me the vision of BLUSH and how we move forward is continuing to be informed by youth on how we deliver sex ed. Because that is what the research shows: youth are desiring more inclusive, more comprehensive, evidence-based sexual health that has queer knowledges and all sorts of things that we're trying to work into this program.

We live in a world that is very complex and aspects of it are really toxic and unwell. And when we talk about in-depth discussions around consent and what coercion and the nuances of coercion look like, we teach people of all genders all the same things. Everybody has that consent knowledge then and it starts to shift and change the power dynamics, is what we're hoping.

I want to bring inclusive, comprehensive and evidence-based knowledge to youth, because that's what they deserve. I want to move away from abstinence-based education, as it's more harmful than helpful.

Why is abstinence-based education more harmful than helpful?

van Westen: Abstinence-based teaches people not to have sex and doesn't talk about sex. It says the only way to not be pregnant or get an STI is complete abstinence. And absence-based work is really fear-based in its approach to engagement. When a large percentage of the population is engaging in sex, when they don't know how and they're not taught proper consent, then people get harmed. We want to move away from sexual assault and harming people due to a lack of knowledge and understanding.

Baker: I think another important aspect is that it stops people who have an experience with sexual assault from reaching out because they feel like there's going to be a repercussion for them. They fear their parents are going to get upset, there's not going to be support, there's going to be a general feeling of stigma, they're going to face a judgement, which, unfortunately, is the case for some people. But it's giving people a safe space where they can talk or they can be connected to resources.

How does BLUSH talk about pleasure?

van Westen: We talk about sex as as a point of pleasure. It's one of the reasons why people are curious about it. So we talk about that in our Safer Sexy program. We ask the question, why do people go have sex? And pleasure comes up regularly, it is absolutely a reason why human beings engage in sex.

The reason I bring up pleasure is sex ed taught in schools today doesn't necessarily mention it. But also, there is — and maybe this is a bit beyond sex ed — a pleasure gap between the genders and the sexes. Does that ever come up?

van Westen: I've been looking at a lot of the research around pleasure and it shows that sometimes the people who are having the most sex are having the least amount of pleasure. Cis males are some of the people who are lacking pleasure in their engagements.

We don't really get into the engagement of sex. When we're talking in Grade 8 and Grade 9, we're talking to human beings who for the most part aren't engaging in sex. This is future information. We talk about pleasure as an aspect of sex, and one of the main reasons that people engage in sex. But we don't necessarily talk about the pleasure gap.

As we design programming later on, I think when we're looking at our Grade 12 program, we want to do some consent-based stuff that's going to be more real-world, outside of the institution of school. Like how to be safe in bars and when dating online. And I think that space is the position to maybe discuss more the different aspects of pleasure. When the age is a little older, they're more likely to be engaging in sex.

Baker: I think that's another part of not having abstinence or fear-based sex ed is understanding that when youth are having sex, the reason is pleasure-based. Obviously there are variations to that, but I know within my peer group, there's no one that's using sex as a means to get pregnant.

I also think understanding pleasure is also intimacy and connection between partners is really important. In our workshops, we emphasize individual exploration a lot and how pleasure can also be found through self-discovery, masturbation and that kind of thing.