The Fight For Comprehensive Sexuality Education in Honduras
El Progreso, Honduras — Twelve girls sit around the plastic tables with papers and colored markers strewn across them. Working in pairs, they are going through the stacks of interview transcripts and survey data with stories of girls from across the city: a fifteen-year-old pregnant with her second child, an eleven-year-old who was raped and left pregnant by a male family member, a twenty-two-year-old struggling to find a way to get back into education while raising the son she had at seventeen – and countless more.
The girls are part of a group called Las Niñas Lideran el Cambio or, in English, Girls Leading Change. Hailing from high schools and universities across northern Honduras and ranging from 14 to 23 years old, the girls are active advocates for gender equality and the implementation of comprehensive sexuality education (CSE) in Honduras. Over the years, the group has protested violence against women and girls and played a leading role in the struggle for the inclusion of sexual health education in public school curricula.
In 2019, the girls made waves by successfully getting the municipality to pass a new policy formally including sexual health education in the annual high school curriculum. Despite this victory, the policy was never implemented. In 2023, the group reconvened to conduct a study on the current state of sex education in their city and create a documentary to pressure the Honduran government to enforce the policy they had fought for.
Led by girls and young women, the group is supported by the Organization for Youth Empowerment (OYE), a local NGO in El Progreso, Honduras’ fifth-largest city. OYE attracts young people from marginalized communities across the city, offering a safe, inclusive space to express themselves and engage with others as active agents of change. Many OYE youth describe the space as an “oasis,” and it truly feels that way, a world apart from the city streets outside its doors. Girls Leading Change focuses on creating a space for girls to access sexual and reproductive health education and develop leadership skills, providing them with the tools and training to lead advocacy efforts for gender equality rooted in their own experiences.
The need for such a space is clear: Honduras consistently ranks among the countries with the highest homicide rates in the world, and gender-based violence is especially prevalent. From 2022 to 2023, despite the overall homicide rate dropping, femicides increased from 6.2 to 7.6% of the total, the highest femicide rate in Latin America. In 2023 alone, the Honduran Centre for Women’s Rights reported 386 violent deaths of women — one death every 22 hours. The same year, there were 34,221 reports of domestic violence and 52,327 reports of family abuse. It was also the most violent year on record for the LGBTQIA+ community. In the first six months of 2024, 121 cases of femicide and violent deaths of women have already been reported. Despite a 2013 amendment to the Criminal Code to include the crime of femicide and the establishment of a Special Prosecutor on Women, 95% of femicide and sexual violence cases still end in impunity.
Why these high rates of violence exist is complex. Gang violence, poverty, crime, corruption, and patriarchal machismo culture create a perfect storm for gender-based violence. To help young people better understand and prevent violence, OYE uses a tool called a ‘violent-o-meter,’ which shows how different forms of gender-based violence are interconnected. The violent-o-meter ranges from yellow (hurtful jokes, lying, jealousy) to orange (intimidation, controlling behavior), to red (aggressive touch, isolation), to purple (threats, sexual abuse, rape), to black (murder). The idea is that gender-based violence manifests in varying degrees and forms, each reinforcing the next.
Girls Leading Change takes a bottom-up approach, focusing on comprehensive sexuality education as a way to promote young people’s rights and gender justice. The group sees CSE as a way for young people to acquire information about their sexual and reproductive rights, develop life skills, and nurture positive attitudes, self-esteem, and a positive attitude toward their sexual and reproductive health.
“What I think is most important about comprehensive sexuality education is that from the very beginning, we are learning about ourselves,” Keyrin, a 19-year-old sociology student, women’s rights activist, and group leader, tells More to Her Story. “Through participating in this project, I have learned so much about comprehensive sexuality education. I thought these topics were taboo and I shouldn’t talk about them, so participating in this project has shown me that these topics shouldn’t be taboo and we should be able to talk about them freely. We should be able to talk about our self-esteem, to know how to communicate well, to know about forms of contraception, about the causes and consequences of pregnancy; all of these things are important.”
Another participant, Nicole, 20, adds, “It has been important for me to learn about these topics because now I can be an agent of change for myself, for the neighborhood where I live, and for other people in our society,”
Honduras has the second highest rate of teenage pregnancies in Latin America, with one in four births to a girl under the age of 19. According to municipal authorities in El Progreso, teenage pregnancy rates are increasing.
“So many pregnant young girls arrive at our health centers,” says Neybi Fuentes, the city’s Director of Health. “And we have to remember that there are many girls who don’t come to the public health centers. There are private clinics, and many who never even receive a check-up [during their pregnancy].”
Katy Molina, the director of the NGO Unbound in El Progreso, says: “The statistics are clear. The numbers are going up every day, and if a young person — a young woman especially, although young men also become fathers at very young ages — decides to abandon their education or the activities that they are part of [because of this], that’s all left behind.”
Many adolescent pregnancies are a result of abuse, rape, and lack of access to sexual education and contraception. Teachers report cases of students as young as eleven with pregnancies to much older men and often family members.
Within Girls Leading Change, most girls say their first experience with comprehensive sexuality education was at OYE. As part of their training, they learn to conduct CSE workshops and replicate their learning at high schools across the city. However, to push for change on a structural level, they also conducted a Participatory Action Research study. The young women who were part of Girls Leading Change as workshop leaders investigated these topics from their own perspectives. The result was a study that illuminated the harsh realities caused by the lack of CSE in Honduras, a tool the girls hope to use to push for CSE’s implementation. Over nine months, the group conducted 27 in-depth interviews and 84 surveys with a total of 111 participants in public schools, universities, hospitals, and health centers. They also created a documentary film to reach a wider audience.
OYE participants holding up their certificates.
Most teachers are supportive of the girls’ work. “It’s so important, and it should continue. It’s important to focus on giving youth accurate information and supporting them,” said a school counselor at one of the city’s largest public high schools, attended by several of the Girls Leading Change members.
Many parents are also supportive, though some are more hesitant, having never received sexual education themselves and experienced teenage pregnancies firsthand.
“I think it’s very important [that we talk about sexual health with our children], that we give them advice not to have children early, not when they are under eighteen, but rather when they are older. When I got pregnant young, it was not easy,” says a 42-year-old mother of three. She had her first child when she was 16, without any knowledge of contraception, and dropped out of school after 9th grade as a result. “The government needs to integrate sexual education in Honduras,” she tells More to Her Story.
“It’s important to highlight that OYE drove the municipal public policy,” says America Rajo from El Progreso’s Health Social Communication Unit. “But if the [policy exists only on paper] and isn’t being fulfilled, a lot of efforts come to nothing because they are not given the support that they should be. But someone has to start… and that gives me hope!”
Despite much support, there is also resistance. Older generations, particularly religious groups, oppose the implementation of comprehensive sexuality education, viewing it as a challenge to traditional values and family life.
In January 2022, Honduras’ first female president, Xiomara Castro, took office with promises to support women’s rights. On International Women’s Day in 2023, she overturned a 13-year ban on the emergency contraceptive pill – a significant step forward in a country where abortion remains illegal in all cases, punishable by up to six years in prison. Later that year, President Castro initially supported a law to introduce sexual education in schools to prevent teen pregnancies. However, strong opposition from religious groups led to widespread protests, and despite the law passing in Congress, Castro ultimately vetoed it.
Compounding this, anti-rights movements are gaining strength across the region, placing further restrictions on young people’s access to information about their bodies, rights, and identities. In Girls Leading Change’s research, this stood in stark contrast to youth’s responses, where there was more widespread recognition of the discrimination faced by young people who resist patriarchal gender roles, and especially LGBTQIA+ youth.
Most resistance comes from adults, who have varied perspectives on who should be responsible for implementing CSE and what it should entail. However, the girls found that young people are not only more likely to support CSE but also more inclined to hold the government responsible for its implementation.
“The government has a responsibility to create an environment that supports the sexual and reproductive health of young people and enables them to make informed and healthy decisions about their sexuality,” wrote an 18-year-old female university student in a survey response.
Young people from OYE, who have had overwhelmingly positive experiences engaging in and replicating comprehensive sexuality education workshops, are eager to continue deepening their knowledge and ensuring it reaches others in Honduras and across the region. “If more young people understood what comprehensive sexuality education is and had access to it, we would see a decrease in adolescent pregnancies,” says Veronica, a member of Girls Leading Change. “Many young people are getting pregnant because they lack this crucial education, and it's something they should receive.”
Keyrin says it best: “What we want as Girls Leading Change is for the municipal government to pay attention to the public policy about comprehensive sexuality education. Read it, assign a budget to it, and make sure it is not a project of just a few months but something that is always carried out in schools because boys, girls, adolescents, and youth, we need it.”