If you’ve noticed that we’ve kept creating and promoting sex and relationships content during the harrowing times we’ve been living in, and you’re wondering why, or feeling like we shouldn’t, I want to explain why we do.
The model I created for Scarleteen is Montessori-based, and has been the way we have worked from the very beginning. What we create — and promote — doesn’t spring from our ideas of what young people need. Instead, we base what we create on what the people we serve either come to us explicitly asking for, or what we observe them to need through our direct interactions with them. Sometimes we also create content based on what we see young people at large asking or otherwise expressing a clear need for, such as the harm reduction information we published on choking last year.
As has been the case for the nearly three decades I’ve been running Scarleteen, during which time the…