In a secondary school in a popular neighborhood of the city of Córdoba, Students made masks with the different faces of gender violence together with the Art and Life and Work Training teachers., for a science fair. Then, the boys and girls marched through the neighborhood with masks and flags that said “Enough of sexist violence.” When they asked them what they had left of the work they had done, one of the girls spoke up and summarized: “We learned that we can say NO”. The experience is one of the many examples collected of the impact of Comprehensive Sexual Education in the country. The account to Page 12 Natalia Di Marco, teacher for 14 years at that school – IPEM 13, Doctor Pedro Escudero, from the Colón neighborhood -, academic coordinator of the Diploma in ESI, Genders and Sexualities of the Faculty of Philosophy and Humanities of the National University of Córdoba and from the ESI Department of the Manuel Belgrano School of the same higher education institution. Di Marco is part of the Federal Movement xMásESI, which was launched this Thursday to “defend comprehensive sexual education as a right and public educational policy.” It is a federal group of teachers who work at all levels and modalities of the educational system (from initial to university), in unions, and different levels of the national and provincial governments; of journalists, activists in social organizations, professionals, popular educators and territorial promoters of gender and diversity. “We meet around the conviction that Comprehensive Sexual Education is a project of justice and equality to improve the quality of life of all people,” says the presentation manifesto of the xMásESI Movement.
The launch was made within the framework of a political context in which one of the candidates with a chance of being president, in this Sunday’s elections, has in his platform the elimination of the ESI – which has been law for 17 years – , a pedagogical tool that has proven to be essential to protect boys and girls from sexual abuse in childhood, prevent sexist violence, bullying and unintentional pregnancies in adolescence, and accompany the transition processes of trans students, among many others. achievements.
“The intention is to make visible the value of ESI and what we have been doing in these years thanks to the framework of the law,” Bárbara Riveros, coordinator of the Diploma in ESI at the National University of Tres de Febrero (UNTREF), told Página 12. , about the objective of the Movement.
“The ESI is a commitment to a cultural change, a teaching of other ways of relating interpersonallywhich weights affectivity and in addition to guaranteeing rights around sexuality and improving the quality of life, disarms and makes visible all types of violence and multiplies worlds where all diversities are possible, dissidence, ethnic, functional. It is the possibility of a world based on the protection of human rights«, Belén Barral, a graduate in Education and specialist in ESI, an activist for LGTBIQBN rights and a member and part of the group that founded the Teachers’ Network for the Right to Decide in the province of Tucumán in 2018, highlighted to this newspaper. Among her many experiences with CSE, she recounted one that occurred in a public school in working-class neighborhoods: “We talked about teenage motherhood, this caused the group to unite and stop discriminating against a classmate for having been pregnant. Accompanying them to investigate and make them aware of their reproductive and non-reproductive sexual rights even impacted the way they look at their peers, understanding that the right to decide is something personal and that careful and well-informed support is essential to decide without guilt and making use of their real rights,” he recalled. The group of students – he specified – carried out a sample as promoters of information on the right to decide and teenage pregnancy, from contraceptive methods to the right to abortion and medical consultation without being judged and without the need for an adult to accompany them, taking care of their confidentiality. . “This was very powerful considering that we are talking about Tucumán, the province that unconstitutionally proclaimed itself pro-life, paraded a giant fetus with marches organized by the same rulers and the financing of the Church, where we had the case of Lucía, the abused girl forced to give birth, and that of Belén, a young woman imprisoned for an abortion spontaneous. That 16-year-olds recognize and know their reproductive and non-reproductive rights, lose guilt over their life decisions, can live a responsible sexuality and enjoy it, talk about consent and free decisions was simply wonderful. It changed their perspective on life, it even improved their mental health and the bonds of solidarity between peers,” Barral told this newspaper.
In Entre Ríos, Florencia Milito works in the city of Gualeguaychú as a higher education teacher in teacher training institutes, where she teaches, among other subjects, the Comprehensive Sexual Education Workshop and at the same time she is a Comprehensive Health advisor for Adolescents in public secondary schools and in a Primary Health Care center, as part of the National Plan for the Prevention of Unintentional Pregnancy in Adolescents (ENIA). In this journey with the ESI, she had to accompany her transition to a 14-year-old adolescent with female genitalia but with a male self-perception. “There were few people who knew about it anymore because it was difficult for him to tell it for fear of anger both in his family and at school, where he was required to attend in the female uniform, which made him very uncomfortable,” he recalled. Then, she Milito told him about the scope of the Gender Identity Law, about her right to be called by the name she chose and to have her male gender expression respected. “The following week he looked for me again to ask me to help him ask the school authorities to change his name in the records and inform classmates and teachers what to call him and address him from that moment on. The actions that were carried out in the first instance were to speak with the tutor of his course, then with authorities and a meeting was also held with his family. And then we also did a workshop for teachers, preceptors and adults who had a relationship with him at school. He was always very grateful,” recalled Milito, graduate and professor of Sociology at the UBA, to give an account of the importance of ESI in the lives of boys and girls.
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