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 Morris Green helps run a junior high class that’s just for boys. The students sit in a circle, call the teachers by first name and are allowed to swear.

The goal is to make sex education less awkward and to encourage boys to have open and honest conversations about sex and health.

In his job as the co-ordinator of youth health for the provincial Department of Health and Wellness, Green noticed that most of the traffic to the youth health centres in schools is young women.

There are 55 youth health centres in schools across the province. They are designed to be hubs of health promotion in schools and a place to access the health care system.

If a student is having a problem with anything from depression to sexual health, a youth centre co-ordinator directs the student to a service that can help.

Green wanted to create a strategy for boys to recognize when they have health issues and want to access these health services. He got permission from the school board and the Department of Education to run a Grade 9 healthy living course for boys only.

The content of the course follows the curriculum, but Green says the material is delivered in a new way.

“What we try to do every week is introduce a subject, kind of move them through an
experience that leads them to a place of conversation,” says Green.

Topics they might discuss include masculinity, pornography and drugs and alcohol.

“So it’s less about the healthy living teacher talking or me talking and more about the people in the circle having a conversation.”

Green says the idea is to create a safe space for boys to open up about health issues they might not have discussed if girls were present.

This year Green runs the healthy living classes along with teachers at two Halifax schools, one class at Highland Park Junior High and two at Oxford School. Green says the number of boys accessing youth health centres at these schools has increased considerably.

“I don’t think guys have had the space to have conversations about a wide variety of youth health issues, including some of the things connected with sexual assault, intimate partner violence and consent,” says Green. “Certainly a piece of our work is to take a look at that.”

Jean Ketterling, volunteer co-ordinator at South House Sexual and Gender Resource Centre, says, “a big part of sex education is discussions about consent and I think we have to have those discussions with all genders present and we have to have those discussions openly.”

Green says the classes don’t always have to be segregated but that safe space is needed on certain topics. This year the schools involved have also introduced a girls-only version of the classes.

“What our sessions have taught us is that you can have a very different kind of space that leads to a very different kind of conversation that ultimately has people stepping forward and talking about their own personal health. That can be a youth of any gender, not just guys.”

However, a problem the program faces is the inclusion of youth that identify as transgender.

“We are still trying to navigate that piece for youth who feel they do not belong in a girls group or a guys group,” says Green.

He says they don’t want to add extra stress on students who don’t feel like they belong in a certain group.

But Ketterling says it is not ideal to create these divisions.

“Sex education is already so hetero-normative and not many people acknowledge that so already we are erasing trans people. We are erasing queer people in the sex education.”

By Hanna Petersen: Published in the Halifax Commoner on November 27, 2013.