ABSTRACT
Moral panics besieging sexuality education have had a long unfolding history. These later moral panics, especially in respect to their historic antecedents, shared many characteristics with the moral panic surrounding alcohol and illicit-drug education and physical fitness. According to UK research, current sexuality education programmes allow many individuals to "look back in anger" at how they perceive these programmes allowed these individuals to "slip through the net". Through moral panics and their associated media discourse, programmes of sexuality education are in a continual state of adapting to changing political imperatives. Political meddling and moral proscriptions, disregard for scientific evidence, and the absence of a coherent approach regarding sexual and reproductive health rights have undermined sexuality policy in the US. In the US the civil rights and women's liberation movements of the 1960s and 1970s dramatically altered societal rules about sex, race and gender.
