Ylikansallisten organisaatioiden problematisointeja ja diskursseja seksuaalikasvatuksesta

Objectives. Internationally, concern for public health trends, such as the spread of STIs and the prevalence of early and unintended pregnancies, has driven the development of school-based sexuality education programmes. Transnational organisations produce policy recommendations for sexuality education, often published as part of broader documents. Previous research has shown that moralising discourses remain prevalent in health promotion, and that political processes shape the work of transnational organisations. Through a document analysis, I aim to explore the problematisations and discourses that ground normative claims by transnational organisations on school-based sexuality education. Methods. Bacchi’s poststructural What’s the Problem Represented to be? (WPR) approach was used to analyse four documents authored by four transnational organisations (the EC, the EWL, the OECD and UNESCO), by means of a critical discourse analysis approach to document analysis. The WPR approach was complemented with reference to Jones’s sexuality education discourse framework. The documents, published between 2020 and 2021, were freely accessible online in English, and their geographical scope included Europe. Results and conclusions. My analysis found that recommendations are strongly grounded in a preventive ethos that views young people as vulnerable, yet assigns them responsibility over decision making in matters related to their sexuality. While the authoring organisations are aware of a need to diminish the focus of sexuality education on risks and disease, they employ the language of health pervasively. The language of health dominates discussion of not just physical well-being, but also of mental and social dimensions. The analysis found a liberal discourse orientation to be prevalent in the data, despite the presence of some critical discourses in documents by the EWL and the OECD. This range of discourses coincides with the use of cis-heteronormative language. The contribution of this thesis is an invitation to envision sexuality education policy possibilities beyond the dominant discourses