Psychosocial aspects of sexuality in adolescents with visual impairments

Abstract

According to the ecological model, all sexual activity results from experiences gathered during the biologically based process of socialization. Therefore, analysis of the impact that visual impairment has on the psychosexual functioning of adolescents should consider not only the functional aspect but mainly the sociocultural aspect. Specific upbringing and education conditions in childhood and adolescence (e.g.: compulsory schooling in a special center - often in a live-in environment, parental overprotectiveness, lack of or unadapted sexual education curricula, etc.) may hinder learning of typical interpersonal interaction patterns and delay one’s sexual identification process. The limited range of social experiences may result in a low mentalization of the need, and, in consequence, a lack of its stimulation, which manifests itself, for instance, in a lower frequency of autoerotic behaviors among blind adolescent boys as compared to their nondisabled peers. Moreover, a lowered self-esteem and sense of interpersonal attractiveness relating to the lack of acceptance of one’s disability, awareness of being dependent on others, and negative reactions of people around which are based on false beliefs about blind people’s sexuality can also make it difficult to build close relationships and form emotional and sexual bonds. A review of studies on the sexuality of blind and visually impaired adolescents does not allow unambiguous conclusions to be drawn about the course of this group’s development. The data collected are generally descriptive in nature and do not fully reflect the specificity of sexual functioning in the whole population of adolescents with visual impairments as, frequently, the studies were conducted with small samples and did not take into account different types and severity of visual impairment. Also, discrepancies in the findings relating to individual aspects of psychosexual development may be due to differences in instruments used by researchers as well as to the sociocultural nature of the approach to sexuality that is specific to the country where the study was carried out.