Sex education and the problematization of teenage pregnancy: a genealogy of law and governance

This essay provides a theoretical examination of the law regulating sex education and focuses in particular on the way in which it responds to teenage pregnancies. Adopt- ing a post-structural approach, it seeks to demystify the ’common-sense’ political consensus in Britain that the current rate of teenage pregnancies is a ’problem’, by examining how they are problematized by the social constructions, and moral and economic values and calculations within dominant political discourses. It then demonstrates how these constructions translate into conflicting solutions, or programmes, of health education and moral education. In demonstrating how these programmes are deployed to govern child sexuality, this essay identifies a variety of techniques of government, such as how different meanings and attributes are given to words like ’children’ and ’parents’ and ’health’ and ’biology’; how the knowledge and expertise of health professionals are legitimized within a particular location and how the curriculum structure itself performs a particular function. In examining the role of law throughout this process, this essay demonstrates how the law concerning sex education operates outside of a repressive juridical model and is able to connect the aspirations and aims of the state with more positive uses of power