Sexually Literate Social Workers: A Review of a Staple of Social Work Professional Training, Continuing Education, Indicates a Lack of Basic Training on Human Sexuality

Background and Purpose:Having sexually literate social workers is essential to providing quality services, yet, sexuality content is either missing or offered only as an elective in many social work programs. As a result, continuing education (CE) is the main institution to ensure continued skill development for social workers post-graduation.  To better prepare sexually literate social work practitioners, we must understand the current landscape of training.  In this exploratory study, we review a sample of CE trainings to answer the questions:  A) What is the sexuality-related content of the professional CE training for licensed social workers? and B) Does CE training provide a foundational course bridging the lack of academic preparation?

Methods: The sample for review of CE opportunities was three-fold: five state chapters of the National Association of Social Workers (NASW), five of the top 10 schools of social work, and five national providers of CE. We sampled universities that were included in both the Gourman Report and the U.S. News & World Report rankings of the top ten social work schools.  A convenience sample of national CE Providers was selected that provided in-person training.  The following search terms to focus our search for relevant workshops: sex, sexuality, LGBT, gender, intimacy, sexual trauma, reproduction, sexual pleasure, sexual orientation, body image, sexual desire, sexual issues, lesbian, gay, transgender, and bisexual. Upon collection of available CE opportunities, we compiled the title, and workshop descriptions into a list of 43 sexuality related CEs for coding.  Of the 43 reviewed, 5 did not contain significant content related to sexuality and were excluded.  The remaining 38 CE opportunities were coded by two independent reviewers to identify topic areas.

Results:Results of coding revealed 16 topic areas related to sexuality. Those areas were: sexual trauma/abuse, LGBTQI, couple’s intimacy, aging and sexuality, sexual compulsivity/ addiction, emotional intimacy, sexuality across the lifespan, cultural attitudes, values, biases, pleasure enhancement, conception/pregnancy/childbirth, dysfunction vs normative sexual behaviors, parenting, desire, polyamory, ethical issues and sexuality, and generalist sexuality awareness raising.  Nineteen of the CE opportunities were provided by university schools of social work, 11 were by third party national CE providers, and 8 were provided by NASW state chapters.  The content area that was represented the most was sexual trauma/abuse, followed by LGBTQI and couples/intimacy.

Conclusions and Implications: As suggested by the 16 topical areas, current CE opportunities are based on the assumption that social workers have baseline skills and a working knowledge of sexuality, and a preliminary understanding of their attitudes and comfort around sexuality.  Of the 38 CE courses reviewed, only one addressed fundamentals such as basic values clarification.  The topic specific CE offerings are important but these offerings should be preceded with basic training on sexuality content and values clarification.  Based on the results of this exploratory study, there is not a systemic and consistent way for social workers to increase their sexual literacy.  We suggest further exploration of this issue and make recommendations for a human sexuality foundational CE course.