More Than A Magazine, A Movement
North Dakota State University nursing professor Molly Secor-Turner has partnered with Planned Parenthood on a sex education program for high-risk youth since 2012. Last month, North Dakota lawmakers targeted this kind of collaboration when they passed a bill that would have put faculty members in jail for working with abortion providers and supporters, fine them, and impose multi-million-dollar penalties on their universities.
Women and girls in India seem to be fighting a triple pandemic: One, that is restricting their mobility; two, that is restricting their access to education and employment; and three, that is pushing them into forced child marriages and cycles of violence.
“My research soon became an extracurricular activity. Men would take it over and over again to not only harass me but any ideology that was not white and heterosexual. It made me realize how much space men take up, even in empty text boxes asking them, begging them, to return to their own worlds. … We tend to forget not only the emotional labor we cast on young women, but the lack of protection female-identifying researchers at the undergraduate level possess.”
Even before the COVID-19 pandemic, access to sex ed was often inconsistent, non-inclusive or even medically wrong. Now, the COVID-19 pandemic has only exacerbated these flaws in our sex education system. But it has also given us an opportunity to push for comprehensive sex ed.
“As a member of the Hazara diaspora, safe in my home in the U.S., it is painful for me to sit front of my computer and write about yet another mass killing. Are you not listening? Why does this continue to happen? … I am calling today for the urgent attention of the United States and the international community. We must re-think the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan. The lives of the Hazara depend on it.”
No category of college students has been harder hit than one that is often invisible: students who are also mothers (and fathers). Despite being largely left out of the national higher ed conversation, student parents make up about one-quarter of all college students, and face barriers like soaring college costs and lack of affordable childcare and housing.
Clemson University settled a historic Title IX case, promising to ensure equality between men and women’s athletic teams.
“Both the men and women sued on different Title IX grounds—and they both won. That’s never happened before. In the past, you had men suing against Title IX. Here you have the men and the women on the same side of the battleground against the university.”
For much of the early 20th century, sex education served to maintain social order and reinforce the interlocking systems of capitalism, patriarchy and white supremacy.
SIECUS’s new resource “History of Sex Education,” provides an overview of the evolution of sex ed and some upcoming policies.
Students in Kentucky are fighting back against unnecessary censorship in school publications.
“I don’t want administration to keep on interfering and scaring us into not writing things that we think need to be written about.”
As federal policymakers confront the parallel crises of the COVID-19 pandemic, climate change and racial injustice, a significant investment in our nation’s care infrastructure—and the work force and green jobs that power it—presents an urgent opportunity to address all three.