The article, “Minimizing Harm and Maximizing Pleasure: Considering the Harm Reduction Paradigm for Sexuality Education”, by Michael Naisteter and Justin Sitron,  has four goals: to define the goals of a comprehensive sexual education program as well as an HIV/STI prevention program, to analyze the absence of pleasure as a topic for sex education program for youth, to define and identify harm reduction based sex education, and, lastly, to offer specific suggestions for implementing pleasure and harm reduction oriented topics into the current sexual education curriculum.

The article begins by arguing that a comprehensive sex education program not only includes disease and pregnancy prevention, which is only one small portion of sex safety, but must also include, “sexual development, sexual and reproductive health, interpersonal relationships, affection, intimacy, body image, and gender roles” (Naisteter and Sitron, 102.) Since the HIV epidemic in 1980s sex education has been primarily focused on prevention of pregnancy and STIs through the use of contraceptives, abstinence, and identification of risky behaviors. This curriculum has continued with the focus of sex education programs on abstinence only.

“Primary prevention operates in a paradigm of risk preemption by exclusively focusing on teaching participants to avoid negative health consequences before they transpire (Broom, 2008). Proponents often emphasize evidence-based programs, medicalization, and behavioral risk (Broom, 2008).” (Naisteter and Sitron, 104.) The article argues that positing safe sex versus unsafe sex sets up a dichotomy that only allows sex educators to teach about sexuality in a negative light rather than teaching that sex, including sex for pleasure, can be positive with risk prevention.

Naisteter and Sitron argue that sex education should be set up on a spectrum that does not polarize any group of people, including those who have sex for pleasure, those who have already contracted STDs or STIs, and who have practiced risky sexual behavior in the past. As sex education is currently, solely based on risk prevention, pleasure is seen as mutually exclusive to safety. The article argues that sex education should be reformed to include a spectrum that includes sex that is not inhibited by sexual safety on one end and sex that is hindered by sexual safety on the other.

By introducing harm reduction programs that view sex positively and acknowledge pleasure. Harm reduction programs would allow sex educators to speak to a wide variety of people who have different sexual histories and promote safe sex including pleasure in a positive light. Incorporated into current sex education curriculum, harm reduction and pleasure based curriculum would have to loo for alternatives to teaching only safe versus unsafe practices, abstinence only, and the use of the condom as the only birth control.

Broom, D. (2008). Hazardous good intentions? Unintended consequences of the project of prevention. Health Sociology Review, 17(2), 129–140.

Naisteter, M., Sitron, J. (2010). Minimizing Harm and Maximizing Pleasure: Considering the Harm Reduction Paradigm for Sexuality Education. American Journal of Sexuality Education, 5, 101-115.