What interests children about sexuality?: exploring narratives and questions from primary school children in Spain.

backgroundIn recent decades, international organisations have advocated for comprehensive sexuality education (CSE) in school curricula, emphasising its role in equipping children with knowledge, skills, and values for informed, healthy, and respectful decisions about sexuality. Despite this, CSE programmes often focus on adolescence, adopting a preventive approach centred on risks like HIV and unintended pregnancies, while neglecting topics such as pleasure, gender diversity, and decision-making. This study explores the interests and questions of primary school children (aged 9-11) in Spain regarding sexuality, aiming to inform CSE programmes that address their real needs.

methodsA qualitative study was conducted with 331 children from eight primary schools in Catalonia, Spain, between 2021 and 2024. Data were co-produced through anonymous written questions (237 submissions), 32 focus groups and group drawings. Through integrating these three techniques, we sought to capture the plurality of children's voices: Anonymous questions enabled individual expression, focus groups facilitated collective narratives, and drawings served as a bridge between the material and the discursive. We conducted a thematic content analysis (Braun and Clarke, Qual Res Psychol 3:77-101, 2006), followed by a narrative analysis (Riessman, Narratives methos for human sciences, 2008). Ethical considerations included informed consent from parents and assent from participants.

resultsParticipants' questions clustered around four main thematic areas: adult sexual practices (27%), childhood bodily experiences related to sexuality (23%), reproduction (16%), and pleasure (8%). While adult sexual practices and reproduction dominated the anonymous questions, focus group narratives revealed how these topics were negotiated through gendered, heteronormative, and age-based norms. Reproduction functioned as a socially legitimate entry point from which children explored broader and more ambiguous dimensions of sexuality, including pleasure, diversity, and bodily change. Children's questions about menstruation and semen revealed fragmented knowledge, uncertainty, and affective responses such as fear, discomfort, and shame, alongside limited opportunities for collective discussion. Topics related to pleasure and masturbation were present but strongly regulated by moral discourses that positioned sexuality as appropriate only for adolescents or adults. Differences emerged across methods and group compositions, highlighting how what children express varies according to the space and conditions of participation.

conclusionsThis study shows that participants actively engaged with questions about sexuality that go beyond reproduction and risk, including bodily experiences, pleasure, and moral norms. However, their interests are produced through intra-actions (Barad, Meeting the universe halfway: quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning, 2007) within adult-centred, reproductive, and age-regulated assemblages, which define possibilities for knowing, feeling and speaking about sexuality. The findings highlight a persistent gap between children's lived experiences and current approaches to CSE, which often overlook affective dimensions, embodied knowledge, and children's own meaning-making processes. Advancing a rights-based CSE requires recognising children as sexual subjects, and creating diverse, safe spaces that allow them to explore sexuality in ways that are inclusive and grounded in their everyday realities.