Giving Compass' Take:

• Ivy Brashear explains how supplementary classes can fill in the gaps in medically accurate sexual education in states where it is not legally required. 

• What does sex education look like in your area? How can funders address the need for sex education at scale? 

• Learn how states are currently teaching sex education. 

Requirements for sex education vary broadly across the country. Only 24 states mandate general sex education, with just 18 requiring information about birth control and only 13 requiring medically accurate sex education. The Guttmacher Institute reports that declines in formal sex education, especially concerning birth control, for young people are most concentrated in rural areas. It reports that the percentage of rural young women who were taught about birth control decreased from 71 to 48 percent from 2006 to 2013.

In states like Kentucky, where Turner is based, sex education is mandated by the state legislature, but it is not required to be medically accurate or age-appropriate, and abstinence must be stressed as part of it. Even with these standards in place, sex education curriculum varies widely based on the school district and who is teaching it.

Turner has been offering Sexy Sex Ed for eight years with very little advertising and having only been paid once. She’s held the workshop for hundreds of young people in five states, meeting in church gyms, the basements of people’s homes, at community colleges and youth centers. She said she is not an expert and has no formal health care training, but has learned much over her time teaching the popular-education-style curriculum. She said it’s filling a major gap in the education young people receive about sexual and reproductive health.

“Kids are like sponges, and they are desperate for this information, and they just don’t have access to it for all kinds of reasons,” Turner said.

With formal sex education in schools lacking, young people are left to turn to their peers, parents, health care providers, or the internet to seek the answers they need. In rural communities, though, these options are often inaccessible to young people who fear judgment and ostracizing from their communities and peers. Also, as Turner said, the internet is not always going to offer the most accurate information.

The problem, she said, is that searching questions about sex will almost always lead young people to porn sites, and though she said she is not necessarily antiporn, “there isn’t a ton to be learned from the porn industry” overall.

Read the full article about filling in the gaps in medically accurate sex education by Ivy Brashear at YES! Magazine.