For over a decade, battles have raged between conservative Abstinence Only Until Marriage (AOUM) sexuality education advocates and liberal Comprehensive Sexuality Education (CSE) advocates. While these battles have focused on the inclusion of health information about contraception and whether or not a curriculum must advocate abstinence as the best and only method to avoid pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases, these debates have often ignored other important values about sex. In this article, Sharon Lamb reviews the recent history of these sexuality education battles, criticizes both AOUM and CSE curricula, and discusses how, in CSE’s accommodation to AOUM objections, ethical dimensions of sex education may have been neglected in favor of evidence-based practice. She then suggests ways in which the current curricula could teach ethical reasoning and make sex education a form of citizenship education, focusing on justice, equity, and caring for the other person as well as the self.

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Sharon Lamb is Distinguished Professor of Mental Health in the Department of Counseling and School Psychology in the Graduate College of Education at the University of Massachusetts Boston. She is president-elect of the Association for Moral Education and is currently working on a sexual ethics curriculum for high school students. Her recent work includes an article, “The Problem with Feminist Ideals for a Healthy Female Adolescent Sexuality,” published in Sex Roles, and a chapter on the same topic in The Sexualization of Girls and Girlhood (Zurbriggen & Roberts, at press). In addition to authoring books on sexual development, therapy with children and adolescents around sexual issues, and abuse and victimization, she coauthored the 2007 APA Task Force Report on the sexualization of girls and two books on media and marketing effects on girls’ and boys’ development: Packaging Girlhood: Rescuing Our Daughters from Marketers’ Schemes (2006, with Lyn Mikel Brown) and Packaging Boyhood: Saving our Sons from Superheroes, Slackers, and Other Media Stereotypes (2009, with Lyn Mikel Brown and Mark Tappan). She earned her doctorate from Harvard Graduate School of Education, where she worked with Jerome Kagan, Rachel Hare-Mustin, and Carol Gilligan.