Perceptions of criminalization towards sex education among a generational sample of Canadian Pakistani Muslims

Abstract

Of late, the Liberal government and the Ontario Ministry of Education implemented revisions to the provincial sex education curriculum, such as gender expression and same-sex relationship dialogue. These revisions led to intense debate of sex education in Ontario. At the forefront of these protests were South Asians, specifically those of Muslim descent belonging to the Pakistani community. The content as well as age of learning was awkward and unconventional, and threatened the collectivistic patriarchal family life and social order creating, at times, a generational divide. The aim of this thesis is to qualitatively explore 16 Canadian Pakistani Muslims perceptions and process of stigmatization, marginalization and criminalization towards the revised sex education curriculum by generation using Berger’s (1967) Heretical Imperative and Crenshaw’s (1991) Intersectionality perspective. Research in this area is scarce and limited and my thesis aims to reconcile gaps in the scholarship and mobilize knowledge to educators and policy makers.