Sexuality: Health, Education and Rights

Dear Colleagues,

We are pleased to invite submissions for a Special Issue in ‘Youth’ titled Sexuality: Health, Education and Rights. This Special Issue aims to explore, as well as to critically examine, adolescent and young adult sexual and reproductive health, the evidence for the positive health and wellbeing impacts of comprehensive sexuality education *, and the rights of young people to flourish as they understand, experience, and express their own unique sexuality. 

While international evidence shows that partnered sexual activity usually commences during the second decade of life, social and cultural beliefs and norms profoundly influence the contexts in which this occurs. Further, young people today express identities, interact with peers and intimate partners, and gain knowledge and misinformation about sex and sexuality through an increasingly complex web of media that was not as widely available even one generation ago.

Yet, young people’s sexual behaviour is heavily sanctioned, and their sexual and reproductive health and rights remain threatened. Some populations of young people are more likely to experience poor sexual, reproductive, and/or mental health as a result of stigma and discrimination, low health literacy, poor access to healthcare, and other factors. When multiple forms of disadvantage compound, the intersectional impacts on health and wellbeing can increase exponentially.

Current predictions for Sustainable Development Goal 5, Gender Equality, suggest that at the current rate, it will take 300 years to end child marriage, considering one in five young women are married before their 18th birthday. Sustainable Development Goal 3.7 (the proportion of women aged 15–49 years have family planning satisfied with modern contraceptive methods) suggests that despite strong progress, it has not been sufficient to meet the target of ensuring universal access to sexual and reproductive healthcare services by 2030.

International bodies such as the World Health Organisation, UNESCO, and the International Association for Adolescent Health have called for comprehensive sexuality education as a right that all young people should be afforded. Further, the International Association for Adolescent Health has ‘called out’ recent challenges to national governments, the WHO, and UNESCO as ‘orchestrated attempts by […] ideology-driven organisations […] to undermine years of legislation and advocacy that […] protect the rights of children and adolescents and also save lives’ (Gray et al, 2023).

For this Special Issue, original research articles, systematic and scoping reviews, commentaries, case studies, and book reviews are welcome. We warmly invite youth-led and/or youth-co-authored papers. We are seeking a diversity of papers: those which reflect the depth and breadth of thinking across sociocultural influences, studies that rigorously evaluate education or health promotion programs and their impact on one or more aspects of young people’s sexuality, health, and wellbeing, commentaries and case studies which provide in-depth analysis and provoke calls to action or solutions, and reviews of books or other media, such as documentaries, films or series, which contribute to our understanding of young people’s sexuality, health, education, and rights.

We look forward to receiving your contributions.

* The term comprehensive sexuality education is used as this is the language of international bodies such as the World Health Organization. We understand and accept that other terminology is preferred in different contexts (e.g., relationships and sexuality education and sexual health education) but that the underpinning principles and evidence base are those articulated by the WHO.

References

Gray, N., Pemde, H., Sawyer, S., et al., on behalf of the IAAH Council. (2023). An Open Letter from the International Association for Adolescent Health (IAAH) about Comprehensive Sexuality Education. International Association for Adolescent Health. Quebec, Canada. Available online: https://iaah.org/statements-cse-2023/.

Dr. Melissa Kang
Dr. Cristyn Davies
Dr. Jacqueline Hendriks
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Youth is an international peer-reviewed open access quarterly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 1000 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• adolescents
• youth
• young people
• sexual and reproductive health
• sexuality
• sex education
• rights
• gender equality