Honest, accurate information about sexuality changes lives. It dismantles stereotypes and assumptions, builds self-acceptance and self-esteem, fosters healthy relationships, improves decision making, and has the potential to save lives.
— Our Whole Lives Website, uua.org/re/owl
Youth in the Philippines face many challenges regarding their sexual wellbeing. Rates of teenage pregnancy and HIV/AIDS are rising, and high rates of violence and extreme poverty prevent youth from making healthy choices and completing their education.
85 percent of the Filipino population is Catholic, which means that Catholic teachings provide the dominant discourse on sexuality. An 18 year, highly politicized struggle led to the national Reproductive Health and Parenthood Act in 2012, which guaranteed access to contraception, maternal health, sex education, and fertility control. Since then, continued opposition from both religious leaders and politicians has prevented adequate funding of reproductive-health programs and severely limited their implementation across the country. Many Filipino youth have limited exposure to and experience with issues of sexuality, human reproduction, and anatomy. They’ve had little to no education about how to protect themselves from sexually transmitted infections and unwanted pregnancy. When unplanned pregnancies happen, young people face a great deal of pressure to marry. This often ties them into a cycle of poverty that can be very difficult to overcome. Sexual abuse, exploitation, and incest are infrequently discussed and, for the most part, young people lack the knowledge and tools for sexual safety and negotiating sexual relationships.
In 2013, Aimee Santos-Lyons, a Filipina immigrant to the US, and her husband Rev. Joseph Santos-Lyons from the US Universalist Unitarian Association (UUA) began holding a series of sexuality education workshops for Filipino youths with the national Unitarian Universalist Church of the Philippines (UUCP) team based in Dumaguete, Negros Oriental, in the Visayas region. The program was developed to be culturally relevant, utilizing local examples, popular education methods, and interpretation and translation work in Tagalog and Visayan languages. This work built on the sexuality education program of HASIK, a feminist organizing group based in Metro Manila that works with urban poor women and girls.
In an effort to expand the workshops nationally, the Rev. Jory Agate from the UUA collaborated with Rev. Rebecca Quimada Sienes from the UUCP to design and lead a Filipino adaptation of the Our Whole Lives (OWL) program. The OWL program first began in the US during the 1960s, when the UUA realized that the youth in its congregation needed guidance around sexuality. It created a secular, science-based curriculum that spoke to the sexual realities youth were experiencing. It provided sexuality education guided by ethics, safety, and responsibility to the community. Over time, with the help of the United Church of Christ, the OWL program has expanded to serve people of all ages. There are thousands of OWL trainers in the United States, and the curriculum is used by religious and secular groups alike.
To bring OWL to young people in the Philippines, the UUA raised money through international networks, relying upon the groundwork laid by the Santos-Lyons’s earlier workshops. Local workshop leaders aimed to center Filipino culture and norms, carefully adapting the OWL curriculum to ensure its relevance to the cultural and economic context of Filipino youth today. Trained peer facilitators assisted with delivery of the material and small group facilitators fostered conversations in participants’ own languages. Workshop leaders created mechanisms to circumnavigate traditional Filipino deference to authority figures in order to encourage more input, feedback, and questions from youth.
Since Filipino Unitarian Universalist congregations are small and rural, a week-long workshop was held at the church’s headquarters in Dumaguete, to which youth from various congregations were invited. To mitigate the privileging of white, Western views of sexuality, the program included guest speakers from the region. Local leaders from the health department led a presentation on contraception, three community members identifying as LGBTQ participated in a panel on sexuality, and an external agency led a day of gender equity and non-violence work with the male participants.
One goal of the workshop was to enable youth to take home and into their peer communities key principles of sexual health. Leaders encouraged the students to remember seven core components of a sexually healthy relationship, which represented the foundational values of the program. When the workshop’s success was later evaluated using a survey, these tenets were participants’ most significant takeaway, along with newfound acceptance of the LGBTQ community and a commitment to using contraception.
Leaders recognized the limited reach of this one-week workshop. The young participants could only absorb so much information from their first experience of comprehensive sexuality education. Additionally, the workshop only reached a tiny fraction of the Unitarian Universalist youth in the Philippines. For greater change to occur, these programs need to be available much more widely. In the process, however, they must retain their cultural specificity, connecting a global effort to the languages, norms, and concerns of the places where they spread.
