This text is part of the special edition Pride Montreal
Even though sex education courses have been mandatory in all primary and secondary schools in Quebec since 2018, the quality of learning varies from one establishment to another, according to different community organizations, which are calling for better equipping of staff.
For Milca Bibeau, political coordinator at the Coalition ÉduSex, although the current program is “very good,” adequate training, sufficient funding and monitoring would be necessary to ensure that the content taught is “really quality content,” she adds. “We have qualified specialists in Quebec. We have a bunch of sexologists and community organizations that would be very happy to go into schools, but the funding doesn’t necessarily go to them,” she explains.
The contribution of the community
Since the introduction of mandatory courses in 2018, each student receives 5 to 15 hours of sex education annually. Interpersonal and sexual relationships, sexual violence, sexual stereotypes, STIs, pregnancy, as well as issues related to gender and identity are addressed, according to the Ministry of Education’s program.
The first sex education program was created in Quebec in 1986. It was taught through the personal and social training course (FPS). When it was abolished in the early 2000s, the community sector took over, according to Milca Bibeau. She believes that having access to community expertise in schools would allow teachers to be better equipped.
An opinion shared by Pascal Vaillancourt, CEO of Interligne, which is an intervention and listening organization for people who identify with sexual diversity and gender plurality. “Since there is a lack of specialists in schools, we can question how the content will be presented. Especially since with LGBTQ+ issues, there has been a diversification of vocabulary in recent years to better explain the realities. I don’t know to what extent all schools have the resources to explain them well,” he gives as an example.
Representation of LGBTQ+ realities
Interligne also organizes workshops and training sessions in schools. The organization’s executive director has noticed a change in the last two years or so among some young people. “We’ve noticed that there are a lot more hateful comments toward LGBTQ+ communities in schools. We’ve also observed that young people will sometimes make homophobic comments and that these don’t necessarily come from their parents. It seems like there are new trends and that worries us,” he says. “We’ve also seen young people who asked to leave the classroom when we came to give training because they didn’t want to hear about it, for several reasons. We didn’t see that three, four, five years ago,” adds Pascal Vaillancourt.
On the staff side, the activities given in the classes are generally well received. It is the teachers or the management who will request them. Despite this, “the staff is often very afraid of having to manage a situation where a parent would make a complaint. It is not uncommon, at Interligne, for us to receive calls from professionals in the education environment or from the management asking us for advice,” explains Pascal Vaillancourt.
According to Milca Bibeau, quality sex education is necessarily one that adopts a positive, inclusive and emancipatory approach. This could be summed up as “a comprehensive sexuality education. It is our relationship to the body, to pleasure. It is to show that sexuality can be something beautiful and to dare to talk about all aspects of sexuality, even those that make us uncomfortable”, defines Mariane Gilbert, sexologist and director of the awareness component of the organization Les 3 sex. According to her, this approach allows us to “lift shame, to show that there is diversity in realities and that we are not alone, that there are several types of relationship models while facilitating questions. There are really positive impacts on behaviors”, she explains.
This content was produced by the Special Publications Team of Dutyrelevant to marketing. The writing of the Duty did not take part in it.