Sexual Health Literacy Among Adults With Intellectual Disabilities: A Scoping Review.
Margaret McGrath, Lok Yan Cheryl Chong, Susan Collings and 1 others
PMID 39970322WHAT IT FOUND
No included study focused on sexual health literacy.
Adults with intellectual disabilities had limited reliable sexual education and little privacy or choice, because assumptions of vulnerability, non-sexuality and incompetence restricted their relationships.
Key findings
01Across the 102 included papers, none explicitly addressed sexual health literacy.
02People with intellectual disabilities had limited access to reliable sexual education and often learned from television, friends, the internet or pornography.
03Assumptions of vulnerability, incompetence, non-sexuality and heteronormativity limited opportunities for sexual knowledge and autonomy.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for OTs
Read the rest of this summary
You get three full summaries a month, free, and we do not ask for a card. Search, the TL;DRs and your library stay unlimited either way.
What it does not show
No included study was designed to measure sexual health literacy directly. The review did not appraise the quality of the included studies. Most included studies came from high-income countries, especially Western settings. The level of intellectual disability was not reported consistently, so it is unclear how findings apply across different support needs. Sexual and gender diversity were under-represented in the original studies. Grey literature was not searched, so service reports may have been missed. The authors were not people with intellectual disabilities and all were heterosexual women, which may shape interpretation.
Declared interests
The authors declared no conflicts of interest.
The easy way to misread this
Do not read this review as proof that sexual health education improves sexual health literacy. No included study specifically measured sexual health literacy, and the review did not appraise the quality of the studies it included.