Including Diversity? The politics of sex education in the Netherlands

The Netherlands is internationally regarded as a country that successfully addresses issues of youth and sexuality. The most recent survey into youth and sexuality, Sex under the age of 25 (de Graaf et al., 2017), showed relatively good contraceptive behavior and low rates of STDs and unwanted pregnancies. Statistics show, for example, that in the Netherlands in 2015, 3.2 per 1,000 girls gave birth before they reached the age of 20 (Centraal Bureau voor de Statistiek, 2016), which makes the percentage of teenage pregnancies among the lowest in the world.

Such outcomes, which have been relatively stable over time, have made the Netherlands famous for its sexually healthy youth – the country is often ascribed a guiding role in these issues (Harbers, 2006). Dutch sex education programs have been upheld by the United Nations as exemplary (Kivela et al., 2011), and curricula deriving from Dutch programs are now used in at least 12 countries, including Vietnam, Burundi and Malawi (Vanwesenbeeck et al., 2015). In 2016 alone, 7.1 million youths were reached through sex education programs that were supported by the Netherlands (Ministry of Foreign Affairs, 2017) and sex education has been named one of the most successful ‘export products’ (Ohlrichs, 2015).

This chapter seeks to question the guiding role that the Netherlands has taken in sex education, and explicates the effects of this narrative on practices of sex education in classrooms. To do so it first sketches the recent history of sexuality in the Netherlands; it then explains the favorable youth sexual health outcomes,
and lastly shows how it is practiced by zooming in on two cases derived from ethnographic fieldwork in secondary schools.