Are vacations ever well timed? For the past two weeks, my partner and I have been travelling in Iceland. We’ve had this trip planned for a while, well before Explicit Education was a twinkle in my eye. So, as it happens, I launched this business and then took a vacation. While the timing could have been better, there was a lot I learned about Icelandic sex education, and I want to share that with you.
I’m not going to get into the nitty gritty curriculum because that’s not necessarily interesting, but what I found particularly neat was their annual week-long sex education initiative that started in 2020 called Week6.
Above is an image of me at Iceland’s Phallological Museum, which displays over 200 penises and penis parts of various mammals.
Week6 happens, you guessed it, in the sixth week of the year. Every year, youth in the community decide on a theme for the week, and the School of Equality, which is a city department, develops resources for all grade levels, parents and community centers to discuss and teach on the theme’s topics. There’s so much that’s impressive about this, so let me unpack.
First - this initiative is youth led and relevant to the local community. This is critical for comprehensive sex education, because it directly involves the people who are most impacted by what they learn. Youth tell the adults what is important and relevant to them, and the adults follow suit. This practice puts the youth first, which changes the power dynamic around sex ed completely. The youth are considered experts in their own sexuality, rather than adults dictating what information is important.
I found this sticker on a hike near Skógafoss
Previous Week6 themes include:
Safety and violence (2026)
The body and genitals (2025)
Communication and relationships (2024)
Image reads: Community Centers, Week6, Safety and Violence. Gender and Equality Reykjavik.
Second, the School of Equality is built on the foundation that “sexual health, human rights, and gender equality are taught throughout the school system” by law. It's a policy woven into the system (City of Reykjavik, 2026). Because free public school is mandatory for everyone from the ages of 6-16, we can assume every single person is getting this education at school.
But, this brings me to my third point. The resources created by the School of Equality aren’t just for all grades in school, they’re also for parents and community centers, and they’re made in a bunch of different languages. Again, another component of comprehensive sex education is that it is available throughout the ecosystem of a person’s life - school, home and community. Comprehensive sex education (CSE) is an approach to sex education that’s currently considered the most effective approach, and Iceland explicitly states that this is how they teach sex ed.
I think all of this is pretty great, but like any traveller, I’m prone to glorifying other countries that do things differently than what I’m used to. Despite Iceland being the number one country for gender equality (University of Iceland, 2026), more than 1 in 3 women report experiencing technology facilitated sexual assault or other forms of sexual violence (Harvard School of Public Health, 2026).
This is me admiring a view near Selfoss
