Sexuality, health and relationship education: A perspective of ‘children as rights-holders’

For the ongoing debate on the contents of gender equity education concerning whether or not to include relationship and sexuality education (RSE), this paper is responding to an urgent call to promote the understanding of ‘emotions’ in and beyond classroom and their significance in personal gender/sexual identity constructs. Recently in Taiwan, we witnessed several incidents involved with suicide and homicide of heterosexual and homosexual individuals, some of which happened between young adults. Although the Gender Equity Education Act was proclaimed in 2004, the curricular programme is still a battlefield between LGBTQ rights organisations and the Pro-Family Movement (representing all the Taiwanese parents, as asserted). Drawing on the ‘health and human rights’ theory, this paper identifies a neglected dimension of all arguments: the intersection of children and adolescents’ rights to health and education. Yet, this perspective is particularly relevant, considering the entry into force of the Implementation Act of the Convention on the Rights of the Child in November 2014. I thus argue that it is now the government’s legal obligation to develop and provide RSE – integral of health education and indispensable for a healthy social life.