Sexual Health Education for Youth with Disabilities: An Unmet Need

Individuals with disabilities experience higher rates of mental, emotional, physical, and sexual abuse than those without disabilities. Children with disabilities are 3.4 times more likely to experience sexual abuse than their peers without disabilities. Although a variety of resources have been created to help improve the sexual health of people with disabilities, one area that is seriously lacking is access to sexual health information and education. Previous work has identified several barriers to providing sexual health education to adolescents and youth with disabilities, including lack of teacher preparation, lack of teacher knowledge that leads to fear, concern, and anxiety, parental anxiety and fear, the lack of valid and reliable sexual health education materials for students with disabilities, and the sexuality of students with disabilities viewed as deviant. This chapter will review those issues and discuss methods to improve sexual health education for youth with disabilities