Debating Sex and Sovereignty: Uganda\u2019s New National Sexuality Education Policy

Erin V Moore,Jennifer S Hirsch,Fred Nalugoda,John S Santelli,Esther Spindler

doi:10.1007/s13178-021-00584-9

Abstract

IntroductionThis article examines recent moral panics over sex education in Uganda from historical perspectives. Public outcry over comprehensive sexuality education erupted in 2016 over claims that children were being taught “homosexuality” by international NGOs. Subsequent debates over sex education revolved around defending what public figures claimed were national, religious, and cultural values from foreign infiltration.MethodsThis paper is grounded in a survey of Uganda’s two English-print national newspapers (2016–2018), archival research of newspapers held at Uganda’s Vision Group media company (1985–2005), analyses of public rhetoric as reported in internationally and nationally circulating media, textual analysis of Uganda’s National Sexuality Education Framework (2018), formal interviews with Ugandan NGO officers (3), and semi-structured interviews with Ugandan educators (3).ResultsUganda’s current panic over sex education reignited longstanding anxieties over foreign interventions into the sexual health and rights of Ugandans. We argue that in the wake of a 35-year battle with HIV/AIDS and more recent controversies over LGBT rights, both of which brought international donor resources and governance, the issue of where and how to teach young people about sex became a new battleground over the state’s authority to govern the health and economic prosperity of its citizens.ConclusionsEthno- and religio-nationalist rhetoric used to oppose the state’s new sexuality education policy was also used to justify sex education as a tool for economic development.Policy ImplicationsAnalyzing rhetoric mobilized by both supporters and detractors of sex education reveals the contested political terrain policy advocates must navigate in Uganda and other postcolonial contexts.

Highlights

This article examines recent moral panics over sex education in Uganda from historical perspectives
Beyond recapitulating the ideological divisions between religious conservatism and liberal progressivism that drove US sex panics in the 1990s, we show how Ugandan debates over sex education erupted in another register, one that aligned progressive gender and sexuality politics with neocolonialism
State and nonstate actors “instrumentalize” or “exploit” concerns over sex and sexuality as a “strategic political power play” to generate political currency and to divert attention from other, more pressing issues (Vorhölter, 2017, p. 94; see Kaur Hundle, 2015; Nyanzi & Karamagi, 2015). We build from these insights to explore Uganda’s recent panics over sex education, but we argue that they were far more than a political distraction

Summary

Introduction

In 2016, Uganda erupted in blistering debates over sex education, referred to by one journalist as a “raging controversy among the public.” That year, the government banned sex education in school and non-school settings after public outcry over claims that children were being taught “homosexuality” in elite schools, through a curriculum. The same nationalist rhetoric used to oppose sex education as part of “the UN’s pro-promiscuity, pro-gay, pro-abortion sexual agenda,” as Archbishop Ntagali described, provided a vocabulary justifying the policy by framing it as a tool to ensure sustainable population growth and as the solution to a growing national crisis: widespread youth unemployment Such was the mandate for a sex education policy designed to appease both international donors and a national public which, after a century of internationally funded interventions into sexual health and rights, is primed to regard any policy related to sexuality as a foreign imposition

Methodology

Findings

Conclusion