Children sexual arousal and primary school teachers’ perceptions of sex education training needs

Abstract

The purpose of this research was to identify primary school teachers’ conceptions about sex education in classroom. More precisely, in this paper we analyse teachers’ perceptions of children’s behaviour concerned with sexuality arousal, teachers’ perceptions of their specific training needs to teach sexuality topics and the influent factors in these conceptions. The research was developed in three steps: a questionnaire was carried out and applied to a sample of 486 individuals; a debate was organized between four teachers, being two favourable to sex education and the other ones not favourable; five focus groups were realized with a total of 19 participants. The questionnaire data were statistically analysed. Content analysis of debate and focus groups transcripts was carried out by using the pivot terms method, in order to identify conceptions categories and argumentation. The questionnaire results show that the most frequent children’s behaviours noticed by teachers are: talking about boy/girlfriends; touching colleagues and drawing genital organs; observing colleagues in the toilets; manipulation of pornographic reviews and to have knowledge that children assist to pornographic movies. Teachers’ training needs are essentially concerned with: scientific knowledge to teach what is necessary; to prepare them to answer to children’s unpredictable questions; to prepare them to develop values awareness; to help them to identify and solve children’s sexual abuse; training in articulation with sex education processes at school; and training to deal with these topics with parents. In the focus groups teachers reported several situations of children sexual behaviour at school and specified training needs, not only for them but also for parents. The most influent factors were shown to be the frequency of training courses, to have children, gender, age and time of career, academic qualifications, area of residence, area of work, marital status and religious practice.