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

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.

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.

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).

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.