World Sexual Health Day 2025
Today (4th September) is World Sexual Health Day (WSHD) as a global opportunity to raise awareness about the importance of sexual health as critical to overall health and well-being.
WSHD is celebrated annually to raise awareness of sexual health, rights, justice and pleasure for all and to celebrate and honour our rights to pleasure, autonomy, and respect. The aim of WSHD is to promote education, dialogue and action around sexual rights and health, calling on everyone to promote consent as a fundamental aspect of sexual rights, and to promote sexual health as a global priority. The World Association of Sexual Health define sexual justice as “[existing] when all people have the power and resources to make health decisions about their bodies, sexuality and reproduction. It means building a world where everyone can experience sexual health, rights and pleasure, without discrimination, violence, or barriers”.
This year’s WSWH theme is “Sexual Justice – What Can We do?”, emphasising the importance of creating equitable, rights-based solutions that ensure sexual health and justice for everyone, everywhere. Under this theme, there are four focus areas. The first is Sexual Rights, focussed on sexual justice as essential to achievement of sexual health, rights and pleasure for all people without discrimination, fear, shame and stigma. The second is Sexual and Reproductive Rights, protecting and promoting the rights to bodily autonomy and reproductive choice for everyone everywhere. The third is LGBTQ+ Adolescents: Transgender, Gender-Diverse, Gay and Lesbian Youth, affirming and defending the rights, dignity, needs, and identities of all LGBTQ+ people, especially trans, non-binary, gay, and lesbian adolescents. The fourth focus area is Access to Information, ensuring access to accurate, uncensored, evidence-based information about sexuality and health.
As social workers we need to recognise that sexual justice is a clear dimensions of our practice. There are frequent concerns about sexual abuse, sexual violence and sexually transmitted infections. Social work needs to incorporate wider considerations about health sexuality. This needs to include support for a strengths based approach, for example in advanced interpersonal skills, and utilize a strengths-perspective to counter a pathology focused view of individuals. This identifies sexuality as crucial to a person’s identity and well-being, recognising the diverse needs of vulnerable and marginalised community members.
Social work has a clear role that highlights it is more than a medical issue but critical in promoting sexual justice and sexual well-being. Given social work’s commitment to anti-oppressive and ethical practice, sexual and reproductive health and rights needs to be recognised as essential not only to health and well being but also to gender equality and economic and social development. Whilst it could be suggested that the profession has been slow to respond to sexual rights and risk, social work has a clear role to highlight sexual injustices and counter historical (colonial) ideology, and policies and narratives that impose repression and violence in regulating sexual activity and expression. As social workers we need to identify, challenge and support critical awareness through a sexual justice lens to highlight and challenge systems of oppression and power and in advancing the explicit inclusion of human sexuality within social work.
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More information about World Sexual Health Day can be found here.
