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 world has always been burning in some respect, most of our users still come to us with questions, concerns or curiosities about sex, sexual health and relationships during terrible times. For some, that’s because what is happening in the world isn’t directly affecting them, or because they don’t even know about it. If you were yourself a young person, you may recall that you, your peers, or both might often not have been very tuned into world events: as someone who was very tuned into larger world events as a young person, I remember well how few of my peers that was often true for. It’s developmentally typical for adolescents to be mostly paying attention to themselves and their smaller communities.
For others, that’s because the rest of their lives, feelings and concerns haven’t stopped. People still have bodies during hard times. People still have intimate relationships during hard times, and people still engage in, or think about engaging in, sex and other kinds of touch and intimacy, and thank goodness. Those are things that help many of us get through these times and stay connected to ourselves and to others. None of us can survive these times without each other, and helping everyone build healthy, loving, and supportive relationships, including chosen family, is very much a part of our work. Thank goodness these things are still part of young people’s lives, because with everything they face now, many of them still experiencing the developmental milestones young people always have in their lives is a relief.
If and when young people, or those who care for them, come to us asking for something different, including to talk about or otherwise address some of the things happening in our greater world, we create that content, too, as you might recall we did after the emergence of COVID, for example. We also always try and use our platforms to uplift and inform everyone about current events that affect all of us as best we can.
So, you’ll keep seeing the usual mix you see from us on our social media: we will keep creating and promoting the kind of content you’d expect from a sex and relationships education organization, as well as creating, uplifting, or echoing the kind of content you’d expect from this particular sex education organization, once which has never shied away from or ignored what’s happening outside those parts of life, but still impact young people and the rest of us.
With love,
Heather Corinna, Scarleteen founder and director