POLICY & PRACTICE: Soapbox - Youth work is crucial to the deliveryof sex education

Each day, from almost every direction, we are bombarded with open and sophisticated messages about sex. Does this openness lead to an increased pressure on young people to have sex? Some would have us believe so. Whatever your opinion, there's no doubt that young people are receiving these messages loud and clear.

Young people are disproportionately affected by sexually transmitted infections. Last year, more than 40 per cent of women diagnosed with gonorrhoea were aged between 16 and 19, and we also have one of the highest rates of unplanned teenage pregnancies in Western Europe. These facts suggest that young people aren't following advice about safer sex, but how can we be sure that they were given any in the first place? A survey carried out for the Terrence Higgins Trust last year found that two out of three young people thought the sex education they received at school was inadequate.

Thorough sex and relationship education is a key component of a young person's development. Each young person should learn the biological facts about sex at school, but the moral and social aspects of sex and relationship education are much more contentious.

Should youth work embrace this education as one of its main objectives?

I would say it already does, even though it may not know it. In fact, the youth work approach has been adapted to educate very vulnerable groups of young people for some time. A large number of existing lesbian, gay and bisexual youth projects have emerged through a crisis in young gay men's health. We have quickly learned from young people that knowing the facts about HIV and sexually transmitted infections was useful, but having the life skills to employ that knowledge had greater benefits.

The youth work environment is empowering and we should acknowledge that the nature of the relationship youth workers have with young people is conducive to supporting a comprehensive and meaningful programme of sex and relationship education. Society seems to go into moral panic when young people and sex are mentioned in the same sentence. However, it is naive not to recognise that young people are, like all of us, sexual.

Perhaps our challenge is to approach this issue rationally and understand that young people may look to us for information and guidance. What is stopping you from giving that?

- Got something to say in Soapbox? steve.barrett@haynet.com or 020 8267 4707.