Healthy and Respectful Relationship Education: Differences by Disability Status and Associations With Sexual Abuse

Background: Education about healthy and respectful relationships (HRR) is a key component of comprehensive sexual health curricula and is supposed to be universally provided in Oregon. This study: (1) assesses the extent to which high school students with disabilities received HRR education, and (2) examines associations between HRR education and experiences of sexual abuse.

Methods: Using data from the 2019 Oregon Healthy Teens survey, we conducted multivariable Poisson regression to compare 11th grade students with and without disabilities on self-reported receipt of school based HRR instruction (N = 10,992), and to measure associations between HRR education and sexual abuse experiences among teens with (N = 3736) and without (N = 7256) disabilities.

Results: Students with disabilities were 41% more likely than students without disabilities to say they had never been taught in school about HRR (adjusted prevalence ratio 1.41, 95% confidence interval: 1.25-156). Experiences of sexual abuse victimization were more common for all students who did not receive HRR education (34.1% vs 21.6% among students with disabilities; 16.2% vs 7.5% among students without disabilities).

Conclusions: Students with disabilities are less likely to have received school-based HRR education than their peers without disabilities. Providing inclusive HRR education may help reduce risk of sexual abuse and is essential for addressing health disparities affecting youth with disabilities.