Sex educator or change agent? Experiences of a sex(uality) peer education programme in an era of HIV and AIDS

Includes bibliographical references.Despite the popularity of sex(uality) peer education as an HIV prevention strategy within diverse contexts, an understanding of the experiences of those intimately placed within these programmes is limited. Instead, the majority of research in this field relies on hegemonic notions of rational human behaviour that operates under the assumption that knowledge leads to sexual behaviour change. This study explores peer facilitators, peer educators, and NGO staff experiences of a sex(uality) peer education programme in Cape Town, South Africa to understand meaning-making around sex(uality) peer education within the complex power dynamics of donor-NGO interactions. This study provides a critical case study of a schools-based sex(uality) peer education intervention, drawing on individual and focus group interviews. Using a feminist and gender lense, the study highlights a number of features of the programme and implementation, which reinforces gender inequalities and notions of a rational sexual being rather than creating channels for a new understanding of sex(uality) to emerge. These include peer facilitators’ and peer educators’ experience as change agents rather than sex educators, the preference for biomedical and socio-economic content over gender content, and the overall absence of a critical engagement with gender constructions and power dynamics in relationships. The study also points to the limits of donor-funded interventions, which tend to prescribe the content and scope of schools-based programmes, to the detriment of real engagement with issues that face and constrain the target group including the implications of what ‘sex(uality) education’ has come to mean for young men and women engaged in these interventions