Censorship of sexuality: Suppression of sex education in Brazil harms LGBTQ youth

The HRW report examined 217 of these bills and conducted 56 interviews with teachers and education experts to determine the political motivations and impact of this concerted action on classroom instruction. The researchers found that educators’ widespread fears of political pressure, harassment, and even personal threats had led them to limit discussions about gender and sexuality in the classroom.

Milton Ribeiro, President Bolsonaro’s third education minister, blamed CSE for “eroticizing children.” In the climate created by such comments, a high school teacher in Rio de Janeiro received an anonymous death threat accusing him of “indoctrination” after giving his students a lesson on preventing sexual violence. Another 8th grade teacher in Vinhedo, São Paulo, faced similar accusations of “indoctrination” from the city government after assigning his students research on topics such as feminism and gender-based violence on International Women’s Day.

The threat is ever-present. In fact, every teacher interviewed by Human Rights Watch expressed concerns about teaching their students about gender and sexuality concepts due to political pressure. Twenty of the thirty-two teachers reported facing harassment for raising these issues between 2016 and 2020.

Brazil’s Supreme Court has rejected many proposals to ban CSE, but the political views underlying these bills, supported by President Bolsonaro and other conservative figures, limit students’ access to these curricula by silencing teachers who try to teach them.

There are precedents around the world warning of the dangers that the lack of CSE in schools poses for students, and especially for LGBTQ+ youth. A 2023 study published in The Journal of School Nursing used a rapid review methodology to map global research on how sex education curricula that focus on cisgender and heterosexual relationship styles and neglect alternatives (so-called heteronormative curricula) affect the experiences of LGBTQ students.

The nine articles summarized in this review examine the experiences of student groups from the Netherlands, North America, Australia, and the United Kingdom. These researchers found three core themes in schools with curricula that exclude LGBTQ-specific sex education: a broader heteronormative school culture that encourages bullying of LGBTQ students and ignorance of their needs, the disinterest of LGBTQ students, and the greater use of online resources by LGBTQ students to learn about non-heterosexual relationships and sexuality.

Researchers also found that LGBTQ students developed poor sexual literacy as a direct result of failing to address non-heterosexual identities in sex education curricula. Omitting non-heterosexual experiences in sex education classes fosters LGBTQ students’ apathy toward formal sex education, sometimes leading them to seek information from risky sources such as the internet and direct experiences with sexual partners. When LGBTQ students are excluded from classroom sex education and forced to seek such education elsewhere, they are left without support and increasingly vulnerable to abusive relationships, unwanted pregnancies, sexually transmitted diseases, and mental health problems.

In Brazil, the impact of rolling back sex education is clear. Human Rights Watch cites the high rate of gender-based violence in Brazil, affecting women, girls and LGBTQ people, as an indication of an “urgent need” for comprehensive sex education. While efforts to suppress this education are felt in Brazilian schools and parliaments, international precedent warns that LGBTQ people could be hit hardest by such restrictions.

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