Sex Education: An Analysis of Brazilian Legislation and Official Documents in Different Political Contexts

Abstract

The provision of Sexuality Education in schools can significantly contribute to the reduction of violence motivated by issues related to gender and sexuality. This Sexuality Education needs to go beyond purely biological issues, addressing several other themes, such as body, pleasure, consent, and violence in addition to more obvious issues of gender, sexuality and diversity. However, in order to carry it out, teachers need to have the support of official documents and legislation. This research aims to verify how issues concerning Sexuality Education, gender and sexuality appear in laws, decrees and other publications that guide Brazilian Education as well as to relate them to the socio-political contexts in which they were published. To achieve our goal, we searched for these documents, covering the period from 1990 to 2018, and we focused our analysis on twenty-eight of them. The analysis showed that, in fact, the legislation not only allows, but determines that Sexuality Education be in schools. However, different political contexts have a great impact on the way in which Sexuality Education appears in the documents, sometimes explicitly, sometimes subjectively and diluted in the discourse of diversity and recently, completely silenced. In addition, recurrent cycles of advances and setbacks in different political contexts since re-democratization have culminated in gaps and discontinuities in Sexuality Education policies, impeding the development of a specific law on the subject and preventing its consolidation within Brazilian schools.