Education and gender-based violence

The Manitoba government recently announced additional funding to address gender-based violence in the province. Robust and sustained funding is certainly needed to support initiatives that provide services to victims and their families after gender-based violence happens.

However, the provincial government could also demonstrate their genuine commitment to preventing and ending gender-based violence by following through on updating the provincial curriculum and ensuring all students in Manitoba receive comprehensive sexual health education.

Comprehensive sex education saves lives, reduces homophobic and transphobic violence, sexual violence, and gender-based discrimination, and can help students understand how to foster healthy relationships.

In their analysis of provincial curriculum across Canada, Action Canada for Sexual Health Education found that: “The sex-ed that is currently offered in Canadian classrooms does not live up to human rights standards, the most modern international evidence on best practices, or the 2019 Canadian guidelines for sexuality education.” Our own analysis of the existing Manitoba curriculum documents revealed that salient topics, like consent, are absent from the physical education and health education documents.

In October 2024, Manitoba teachers were presented an update on the draft physical education and health education curriculum at the Physical and Health Educators of Manitoba Professional Development Day.

This was a welcome update as the current PE and health curricula were written in the early 2000s, before smartphones or social media. The draft curriculum, dated Oct. 22, 2024 on the presentation slides, was anchored to several enduring understandings: healthy self (including mental health and well-being, and substance use, misuse and abuse), healthy relationships (including boundaries, consent and mistreatment), and healthy communities (including environmental health). This draft took important strides to address some of the harmful gaps in the existing documents.

However, it has yet to be piloted or implemented, despite the presentation slides indicating that the grades 9-12 curriculum documents were to be piloted last year and implemented this year, and the K-8 were to be piloted this year and released next. There has been no clear explanation as to why this promising and desperately needed curriculum has yet to be released.

In the current context there would likely be opposition from “parental rights” groups who have historically opposed comprehensive sexual health education and sought parental opt-out language.

But the government has a responsibility to advance research-informed curriculum and public values, such as human rights and children’s rights, not to placate “parental rights” groups. If that were the case, the provincial government would be allowing lobby groups to undemocratically censor curriculum and undermine public values. Moreover, despite the lobbying of “parental rights” groups, surveys reveal that there is broad parental support for comprehensive sexuality education nationally, with 85 per cent of parents in agreement that it should be taught in schools.

We hope that lobby groups are not preventing Manitoba students from learning about healthy relationships, boundaries and consent. That would be undemocratic, irresponsible and not in line with the government’s recent announcement that it is committed to ending gender-based sexual violence.

Negligent educational responses have adverse consequences. Students learn that eliminating sexual violence is not a societal priority and those who have experienced gender-based sexual violence learn that they are not important.

This neglect has disproportionate impacts on women, gender and sexual minorities, racial minorities, and people with disabilities who are more likely to be victims of sexual assault, harassment and discrimination. It is an abdication of responsibility that places an unfair burden on young people who turn to their own devices when schools fail to offer comprehensive sexual health education. Public schools have an ethical obligation to address the societal problem of gender-based sexual violence and to be responsive to the context that children and youth are currently navigating, inclusive of sexting, sharing of explicit images, sextortion and revenge porn.

This requires research-informed provincial curricula, the support of school leaders, and well-prepared teachers.

Nov. 25 marked the beginning of 16 days of activism against gender-based violence. The provincial government has the power to take very important action to challenge the conditions that normalize gender-based sexual violence by ensuring all students in Manitoba schools receive comprehensive sexual health education. This requires updated curriculum documents that reflect the current research, human rights, and children’s rights.

Shannon D.M. Moore and Jennifer Watt are associate professors in the faculty of education, University of Manitoba.