Representations of Sexual Violence in Sexual Health Education Materials in British Columbia: A Feminist Critical Discourse Analysis


Emily Chisholm, University of British Columbia, Okanagan Campus

The prevalence of sexual violence is an epidemic among young people in Canada. Sexual health education classrooms and learning materials are important sites of organized socialization where social practices and beliefs about sexual violence are represented as knowledge. From an epistemological orientation of feminist sociology, my research investigates how dominant perceptions of sexual violence are reproduced or resisted in public school educational materials through an assessment of their discussions of societal, community, interpersonal, and individual factors that contribute to sexual violence as a gendered social problem. This presentation discusses an original research project I conducted through the Undergraduate Research Award (URA) program at the University of British Columbia, Okanagan Campus, in 2023. Applying a Feminist Critical Discourse Analysis (FCDA), I analyzed how sexual violence is discussed in a sample of 26 lesson plans, curriculum guides, and instructional samples created for sexual health educators in British Columbia. The sample is composed of publicly accessible online materials that contain teaching information pertaining to sexual violence and were selected from online sources where educators in British Columbia retrieve and share teaching materials. To guide my analysis of each text, I developed a set of questions to reflect principles of FCDA scholarship (Lazar, 2018) and recommendations from the guidelines for sexual health education curricula provided by the Sex Information and Education Council of Canada (SIECCAN, 2019). Examples of such questions include: How does the text reflect the ideological character of gender? Does the text define and situate sexual violence in terms of the complex network of disciplinary systems that intersect with each other such as heteronormativity, colonialism, capitalism, and neoliberalism? Are dominant social practices surrounding sexual violence maintained or resisted/transformed? Finally, does the text uphold or privilege certain ideological frameworks or knowledge systems? This praxis enables my project to assess representations of information on sexual violence while locating the meaning(s) of such representations within the broader sociopolitical context, thus serving as analytical activism (Lazar, 2018). My presentation traces three dominant patterns from the learning materials’ discussions of sexual violence: (1) “Prevention strategies discourse”, where the conduct of a potential victim is suggested as a reliable way to prevent sexual violence; (2) “disclosure-centered discourse”, which centers the perceived benefits of disclosing incidents of sexual violence and attributes moral superiority to victims who disclose their experience(s); and (3) “abstinence-oriented discourse”, where violence is represented as a risk inherently associated with sex and a reason to avoid sex altogether. I illustrate key themes of these discourse patterns by drawing on contributions from feminist literature that conceptualize implications of sexual health education and neoliberal ideology in relation to intersecting forms of oppression (Bay-Cheng, 2015, 2016; Dengue et al, 2012; Lamb, 2013). These themes include the (de)moralization of responses from victims and the responsibilizing of individuals to either prevent being victimized by sexual violence, or to mitigate their own victimization. I argue that this sample of learning materials reflects inadequate integration of education that critically examines the sociocultural problem of sexual violence and embodies a hyper-individualistic lens of sexual violence that is upheld by neoliberal ideology. Such a lens obscures the ways that sexual violence is a product of broader systems of oppression which impose social positions that mediate individual experiences with sexual violence. My findings contribute to the body of Canadian literature, which has previously focused exclusively on education curricula in Ontario (Albert, 2022; Bialystok and Wright, 2019; Vanner, 2022). Addressing calls from Bay-Cheng (2016) and Vanner (2022), I discuss a sample lesson plan on sexual violence that incorporates feminist critical pedagogy and reframes the focus away from the individual in educational discussions of sexual violence. Reiterating the central focus of my research questions, my sample lesson plan exemplifies a contextualized delivery of information pertaining to societal, community, interpersonal, and individual factors that influence the social problem of sexual violence. I conclude by discussing the future directions that this research might take to address the limitations of the project at present. By advocating for school curricula that adequately address and resist power relations, this research offers contributions to broader feminist sociological efforts to understand the relationship between the communication of knowledge and social inequalities.

This paper will be presented at the following session: