Providing Sex Education to Persons with Learning Disabilities in the Era of HIV/AIDS Tensions between Discourses of Human Rights and Restriction

Research suggests that disabled people may be at increased risk for HIV infection, yet are excluded from HIV prevention campaigns. Historically people with learning disabilities have been constructed as either being asexual or sexually uninhibited, and sex education considered to be unnecessary or potentially harmful. This article reports on findings of a qualitative study exploring the challenges expressed by participants who provide sex education for persons with learning disabilities, revealing a tension between a human rights discourse and a discourse of restriction of sexual behaviours. Sex education, in the context of HIV/AIDS, may potentially construct sex as dangerous, echoing past constructions of disabled people's sexuality as problematic.