One youth organisation has come out in support of the contentious Comprehensive Sexuality Education (CSE) being introduced in schools here.Amid concerns that attempts were being made to slip the CSE agenda into the curriculum – on the heels of the controversial Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) survey that questioned students about their sexuality and gender identity – the Youth Advocacy Movement (YAM) said there were benefits to such a programme, including demystifying taboo topics using age-appropriate methods.CSE is a curriculum-based process of teaching and learning about the cognitive, emotional, physical, and social aspects of sexuality, but there has been opposition in some quarters locally, regionally and internationally to it, based on the belief that it promotes sexual education in an unhealthy and disruptive manner.However, in a proposition entitled An Argument for Comprehensive Sexuality Education to Remain in Schools, YAM, which works with the Barbados Family Planning Association (BFA), insisted that young people continued to have sex while the abstinence-only/religion-based sex education programme is “one of the least effective ways to comprehensively educate our youth about sex and sexuality”.
