Sexual Education in Denmark

DFPA launches 5th edition of successful CSE campaign in Danish schools

For the 5th year running the Danish Family Planning Association (DFPA) on Monday launches a national campaign on comprehensive sexuality education (CSE) in Danish primary schools, lower secondary schools and upper secondary schools.

Once again the campaign is reaching record numbers of participants – all in all a total of 186,252 pupils aged from 10 to 19 years are enrolled in the campaign named Uge Sex (Week Sex).

Week Sex targets pupils from 4th to 13th grade in Danish primary and secondary schools. Almost 40 percent of pupils in primary and lower secondary schools in Denmark participate in the campaign in week six from the 6th to the 10th of February.
The purpose of Week Sex is to give teachers the opportunity to access quality CSE materials, which ensure captivating and professional sexuality education. The DFPA produces new materials for both pupils and teachers every year.

This year the title of the campaign is ’Gender really matters’, focusing on the desire, opportunities and right to express your gender on your own terms – without being discriminated.

The Danish minister for Education and Children, Christine Antorini says:
- The DFPA manages the important task of bringing into focus subjects, that can be difficult to talk about and the association has just assisted us in making whole new materials for the teachers. It focuses on the right to be who you are and contributes to the opportunity to teach about sexuality in a very competent way.

When the DFPA launched Week Sex in 2008, 39,000 students were enrolled, and that number has grown steadily over the past five years. In 2005 the DFPA carried out a mapping of CSE in Danish schools, which showed that only 1 in 10 teachers were satisfied with the comprehensive sexuality education they were offering. It showed a lack of knowledge among teachers as well as lack of current CSE materials in the schools.

In 2012 the campaign has grown to consist of:

• 14 different materials targeting both pupils and teachers at different levels of education · A total of 620 pages of material was produced this year. · 
• The target groups are grade 4-6, 7-9, 10-13, different kinds of upper secondary schools (vocational schools, production schools, trade/economic schools, general upper secondary schools) and as well as schools for pupils with disabilities. 
• 3 different websites targeting different age groups. 
• 23 videos with pupils and famous people in Denmark + pupils and LGBT activists Uganda talking about gender issues.
• Events around the country – among these a pre-launch event Thursday at the Danish Parliament where 11 MPs were taught CSE with media present.

2012 is the first year that the DFPA has included international angels to the campaign bringing in the voices of young girls and boys from Uganda on the same issues of gender that the Danish pupils were asked in the videos. Also, an article and two longer videos on LGBT rights and laws in Uganda/Africa/rest of the world are included in the CSE material.
2012 is also the second year that Sex og Politikk in Norway has adapted the campaign material to their own Week Sex campaign reaching a total of almost 37.000 pupils this year.
The Danish campaign also reaches Greenland and the Faroe Islands.

Next year, the campaign will also reach grade 2-3 and the following year grade 0-1.
For further information on Week Sex you are welcome to see further on www.ugesex.dk or to contact our project coordinator Pia Sandra Ernst Psa@sexogsamfund.dk or me.

Kind regards, BJARNE B. CHRISTENSEN Secretary General M +45 2729 0309 | D +45 3369 5609 | bbc@sexogsamfund.dk

Catholics for Russia

I will reproduce this article fully, it deserves.
+ there are very good linx
It reveals the great advantage of catholocism -- availability of church life or live church, very much unlike Russian Orthodoxy

enjoy:

From Russia Without Love

Recent legislation chipping away at reproductive options in Russia has uncomfortable similarities to struggles in legislatures around the United States. Russian women have been able to rely on legal abortion for decades. But in July, President Dmitri Medvedev signed into lawmeasures that require advertisements for abortion to focus on alleged health risks. In mid-October a set of restrictions on reproductive choice -- a measure to cap abortions at 12 weeks and impose waiting periods, ultrasounds and counseling on those seeking abortion --cleared two of the three legislative hurdles required before becoming law.

These steps are being advanced as panacea to Russia's dropping population figures, which some say are a result of the country's abortion rate, which at 73 per 100 births in 2009 is the highest in the world. However, the reality is that their effect will be largely on women's autonomy and rights, with no guarantee that the decline in population will reverse.

Russia's high abortion rate can be partially explained by the fact that Russian women's overall reproductive choices are curtailed, despite easy availability of abortion.

Reproductive choice is curiously lopsided in Russia, where contraception has always been harder to come by than safe abortion. Historically, the medical establishment, political authorities and religious forces asserted that contraception is a Western imposition, a danger to women's health and a threat to the social fabric. The Soviet system rightly saw that modern contraceptive methods promoted individual women's autonomy, and preferred to keep reproductive health care in the hands of state medical providers. Birth control pills, IUDs and condoms were of poor quality and hard to access.

Russia's artificially narrow selection of family-planning options may be unique, but some things hold true the world over. Women benefit from more reproductive choice, not less. A 1999 study showed that when women did have access to birth control, Russia's abortion rates declined. According to a Reuters reportpublished on November 8, "With the arrival to the market of modern methods of contraception in the 1990s, abortion rates fell by almost a third but have since dropped more slowly." The same report pointed to the lack of state funding for family planning programs since the debt crisis of 1998 as one of the factors contributing to the low rates of contraceptive usage.

Another universal truth is that health care serves women best when it focuses on women. But doctors have tended to give patients negative information about contraception, in part because the Russian system does not adequately reimburse for contraceptive counseling. Disturbingly, the recent legislation requiring doctors to share skewed information about abortion dangers continues the tradition of political agendas and faulty science getting in between Russian women and the care they need.

If Russia is serious about reversing population decline, it should be serious about reducing maternal and infant mortality rates -- among the highest in Europe. A 2005 study from the British Medical Journaltraced factors contributing to these trends and found a bureaucracy-heavy health-care system not designed to meet women's reproductive health needs.

Women's and children's health tends to go hand-in-hand. Russia still has far to go in closing the gender wage gap and in meeting the need for child care and early-childhood education. These are the very factors women consider when making childbearing decisions. A survey conducted in 1994 during the Russian economic crisis found that a lack of confidence in the future was correlated with a reluctance to have children. Population growth can be encouraged by non-coercive policies that provide the health care, paternal leave, child care and other supports women want for their families.

Making improvements in women's opportunities has proved to increase birth rates, as happened in Russia during the 1980s when public service benefits were extended to larger families. However, the results of coercive pronatalist policies have also been bitterly proven. Under Ceausescu, Romanian women had no reproductive choice -- the resulting high rates of later abortion and maternal death punished women, as well as the many children who were undervalued or unwanted.

As a Catholic, I recognize that the Catholic hierarchy plays a significant role in promoting restrictions on abortion -- and contraception. In Russia, the Orthodox Church has been supporting recent legislation designed to reduce abortion access. But the dynamic remains the same. These forces weave a tale full of dangers and prohibitions about reproductive choice that have little to do with the real problems and solutions that ought to concern society.

Our research shows that religious leaders do not accurately reflect the needs of their faithful. Reuters quoted one feminist as saying, "Why should a priest decide what I do with my body?" Luckily, public policy and public health have no need for such intermediaries. Policymakers must rise above religious pressure and the temptation to promote quick fixes to long-term problems. Thankfully, proposed legislation that would have required a husband's consent for a married woman seeking an abortion or parental consent for women under 18, as well an amendment to strike abortion from the national health plan were droppedafter proving unpopular in the polls.

There is no easy answer to demographic decline, and making abortion the scapegoat for decades of neglect to women's well-being will not help. Building a stronger society that supports women and children is the long, slow, sure road to a thriving Russia.

 

Follow Jon O'Brien on Twitter: www.twitter.com/Catholic4Choice