BlindFish Ideas

Over the last 2 weeks, for the first time I have taught a full Sex and Relationship Education trainer course. In the past I have helped out on someone elses course and have lead workshops on specific topics at events/conferences. This was the first time I took  responsibility for an entire course. The course I taught is the 4 day  Esteem Resource Network  course. This was the course I was originally trained in and 5 years and 500+ hours of classroom experience later I was now teaching the course. The course had 10 people and I loved opening up the wide field of Relationship and Sex Education to them.  On the course I had 1 co worker, 1 local church based child and family worker, 2 third year youth work students (one who has been on placement with me) and a herd of 6 second year youth work students. So basically everyone was a youth worker or similar  This helped me as it's the group of people I work with the most. I know ...

I have started teaching a lesson on the media's portrayal of Sex and Relationship. The lesson focuses on movies, TV shows and visual pornography. But with all the media hype around 50 Shades of Grey I wanted to do a small scale survey of young people I work with to see if the hype had any grounding in reality. Are young people reading it and is it impacting young people?  At the end of a session looking at the Distortion of Media I handed out some small surveys. Just half a dozen questions and a space for general feedback. I did this with two year groups both mixed gender. A group of year 10 students (aged 14-15) and a group of year 12 students (aged 16-17). With the older group I also asked if the book had encouraged them to experiment with "BDSM/fetish/kinky stuff" but talking with school staff it was decided not to ask that direct question to the year 10 groups. Below are some of the figures from my study, please note it is very small scale and may not ref...

A brief history of sexting and the power of media manipulation  Blog by Adam McLane Whilst I was interested in reading this article I disagree with some of its conclusions. At the moment I am doing some research in the UK looking at online risk taking behaviour with students aged 13-15. I work as a sex and relationship educator and have started including content on sexting with the lessons we teach in high schools. Whilst the history of sexting you outlined seems true and likely the media has done a great job of whipping up the issue I think the problem of sexting is larger then 1%. Our study which in this round has had 160 young people has a higher rate with 20% having seen a naked picture of someone they know. Now in a group of just 160 young people it could 1 or 2 have sent a naked picture and most have seen copies of these 1% pictures. But 20% seeing a naked picture of someone they know is significant. Last year we did not ask that question but we did ask ...