The Social Work of Sexuality: Rethinking Approaches to Social Work Education

This paper discusses teaching about sexuality on social work programmes, and is based a presentation at the Joint World Conference Social Work and Social Development in 2012. The authors analyse dominant, -discriminatory practice approaches to this topic order to raise several limitations, such as a focus upon negative experiences of ‘sexual ’ groups, the establishment of ‘correct/ ’ values, and the imperative to identify homophobic beliefs. Instead, the authors an alternative approach, based upon of everyday practice and discourse, or the in which questions of sexuality are ordinarily and talked about, and they emphasize work’s active production of forms of sexual . The article outlines some examples teaching, in order to question the emphasis codes of practice and values within social work , and suggests ideas for a reflexive to sexuality in practice. Keywords: sexuality, social work, homophobia, , anti-discriminatory practice