A professional perspectives on sex education towards children with disabilities addressing social exclusion

Khairiyah Md. Shahid

Abstract

Sex education is the education related to human sexuality, human sexual anatomy, sexual emotions, and reproduction. Sexual education for disabled children had been taken lightly due to their growth limitation, thus, most of the society thought sexual emotion will not be developed for disabled children. This shows that there is still lack of awareness among the public regarding sex education towards disabled children. Therefore, in this study is initiated to study three objectives (i) To study level of knowledge on sexual health education towards children with disability; (ii) To identify available resources and factors influencing the adequacy of sexuality education among children with disabilities; and (iii) To analyze how sexuality education will help to reduce sexual crimes among children with disabilities. This study adopts a qualitative survey which structured interviews had been done towards respondents who are the professionals related to the disabled children. Based on the interviews that had been done with 12 informants, it is proved that the society still lacks of knowledge regarding sex education towards disabled children. There are also limited resources that influence the adequacy of this education. Besides, based on the finding, it had been identified that proper sex education will protect the disabled children from sexual crimes that might be happened to them. As this study is only limited from the view of professionals and it is recommended that future study can highlight the views from the disabled children and other groups of society. Keywords: children with disabilities, sex education, professional perspectives, social exclusion

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