The Unintended Consequences of Sex Education Latin America Case Study 2022

Name 1
Nelson, Erica, Alexander Edmonds, Marco Ballesteros, Diana Encalada Sotod, and Octavio
Rodriguez. 2014. "The unintended consequences of sex education: an ethnography."
Anthropology & Medicine 21 (2): 189-201
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Course
Instructor
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Name 2
Nelson, Edmonds, Ballesteros, Sotod, & Rodriguez (2014) ethnographic study focused on
the unintended consequences of sex education projects in Latin America. The authors wanted to
understand community needs and the wider socio-cultural contexts that shape the health-care
decisions that people make. The study was guided by an understanding of the role of open
communication between parents and teens as a tool for increasing reproductive knowledge
among the youth through shaping the moral norm1. CERCA is one of the projects that was
implementing this project with the focus of improving open communication between parents and
teens. Through an ethnographic study primarily conducted in Cuenca, Managua, and
Cochabamba the authors aimed to establish the patterns of behavior related to the problem, how
the project was addressing the problem and the challenges faced in addressing the concerns of
the participants. Open communication is regarded as an intervention strategy used by parents to
offer sexual reproductive education to their children in places where it never existed. The
intervention of the CERCA project was to build mutual trust in the participants as a way of
fostering open communication between the parents and the youth. This is because both open
communication and mutual trust are part of the education process that parents and teens go
through.
This study reported that although creating community interventions on sexual
reproductive health is undermined by different understandings of what sex education should
include. This is because some culture treat sex differently and talking about sex with teens in
itself is sex already since it creates the knowledge of the topic to them. This is because the
community norm of mutual trust forbids teens from having sex while the open communication
approach opens an avenue of making the teens feel that they are adults and thus why the topic of
1 Nelson, Erica, Alexander Edmonds, Marco Ballesteros, Diana Encalada Sotod, and Octavio Rodriguez. 2014. "The unintended consequences of
sex education: an ethnography." Anthropology & Medicine 189-201.

Name 3
sex is being discussed with them2. This study also reported that the different ways of social
actors in interpreted by the problem of translating global norms to local norms. This means that
what is globally accepted may not be welcomed in local norms.
From the study, the project communication practices of most international projects
conflict with socio-sexual norms that exist within the local communities because cultures vary
from one place to another and global approaches may not be applicable in addressing sexual
health issues. This study shows that there are larger conflicts of sexual health-related issues
within the society since open communication brought the tensions into light with the difficulty of
solving the issues that arise from this3. Here it means that open communication on sexual
reproductive health has mixed results since it does not always lead to the intended objectives and
at the same time cannot be rated as ineffective.
The findings of this study are similar to what has been done to highlight the socio-
cultural challenges of implementing sexual health education. In most cases, researchers have
reported that culture is a big barrier as compared to religion. In most societies, sex is a taboo and
cannot be mentioned in the public, this is because of the role that society bestows on sex. Being
used as a reproductive function, it means that the use of open communication may not be
welcomed in strict culture societies since it breaks the mutual trust that exists in the society4.
Despite the lack of sexual education in some societies, culture creates a mutual trust that controls
teen sex within the society through setting social expectations that people have on each other.
In most societies, culture is the gatekeeper of information for adolescents and even adults
and thus determines the content that parents share with teens on reproductive health. This means
2 Nelson, Erica, Alexander Edmonds, Marco Ballesteros, Diana Encalada Sotod, and Octavio Rodriguez. 2014. "The unintended consequences of
sex education: an ethnography." Anthropology & Medicine 21 (2): 189-201.
3 ibid
4 Roudsari, Robab Latifnejad, Mojgan Javadnoori, Marzieh Hasanpour, Seyyed Mohammad Mehdi Hazavehei, and Ali Taghipour. 2013. "Socio-
cultural challenges to sexual health education for female adolescents in Iran." Iranian journal of reproductive medicine 11 (2): 101–110.