title: 'The ravages of permissiveness': sex education and the permissive society.
abstract: In this article we explore how sex education in schools has become an adversarial political issue. Although sex education has never been a wholly uncontroversial subject, we show that for two decades after the Second World War there was a broad consensus among policy-makers that it offered a solution to public health and social problems, especially venereal disease. From the late 1960s, this consensus came under attack. As part of a wider effort to reverse the changes associated with the 'permissive' society and legislation of the late 1960s, moral traditionalists and pro-family campaigners sought to problematize sex education. They depicted it as morally corrupting and redefined it as a problem rather than a public health solution. Henceforth, the politics of sex education became increasingly polarized and adversarial. We conclude that the fractious debates about sex education in the 1980s and 1990s are a legacy of this reaction against the permissive society.
authors.affiliation: University of Oxford.
authors.forename: James
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Hampshire
authors.forename: Jane
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Lewis
mesh_terms: D049673:History, 20th Century; D011057:Politics; D012574:Schools / Q000266:history*; D012736:Sex Education / Q000266:history*; D006113:United Kingdom