Genital body image education in adolescents
Body image education is now becoming more commonplace in schools, but there is one part of the body that seems to always be left out of the conversation – the genitals!
The role of genitals in reproduction is usually covered in some manner in sex education classes, but if you’re a young person concerned about how your genitals look or are developing, you’re unfortunately not likely to get a chance to have this conversation in class.
The thing is that having a positive perception of our genitalia is really important for our overall health and well-being. It predicts whether we actually go for our sexual health checks and genital cancer screenings.
This prompted Associate Professor Gemma Sharp and her team at Monash University to begin creating world-first age-appropriate educational resources for young people to help promote a positive genital body image.
In a 2020 study of 343 16-18 year old girls published in Body Image, A/Prof Sharp and colleagues showed that a 2 minute video increased genital anatomy knowledge and satisfaction with genital appearance as well as decreased interest in risky genital cosmetic surgery.
Importantly the feedback from the 16 to 18 year olds, according to Associate Professor Sharp, was that younger girls could benefit from watching the video particularly around the time of puberty, “which led us to exploring this educational video in 13-15 year old girls”.
The main difference between the two age groups was that 16 to 18 year olds are considered sufficiently mature to consent for themselves, but 13 to 15 year olds require parental consent to be involved in research.
Associate Professor Sharp said “it was clear very early on in this research that it was difficult to encourage parents to consent to their daughters participating in this research. We really struggled with participant numbers and we wanted to understand more about the perspectives of parents.”
So, this prompted A/Prof Sharp and her team to concurrently conduct a study with 125 parents of adolescent girls and boys in the 13-15 year old age range published in Body Image.
Most parents were generally very supportive of their sons and daughters participating but there was a slight trend towards parents being less likely to consent for their daughter’s participation, particularly if asked about daughters before sons. Parents were also more likely to promote their sons participating for the reason that they did not want their sons learning about genitals from unreliable sources like pornography.
The main factor related to parents not consenting was harbouring more conservative attitudes towards sex suggesting that they were viewing genitals in a more reproductive sense than a broader body image issue.
About Monash University
Monash University is Australia’s largest university, with more than 80,000 students. In the 60 years since its foundation, it has developed a reputation for world-leading high-impact research, quality teaching, and inspiring innovation.
With four campuses in Australia and a presence in Malaysia, China, India, Indonesia and Italy, it is one of the most internationalised Australian universities.
As a leading international medical research university with the largest medical faculty in Australia and integration with leading Australian teaching hospitals, we consistently rank in the top 50 universities worldwide for clinical, pre-clinical and health sciences.
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