‘It’s Clear to the Kids’: Sex Education and the Ethics of Care in the Narratives Surrounding the Slovak ‘Referendum on the Family’ in 2015

The article is based on the theoretical framework of the ethics of care while examining the media narratives of sex education that emerged in connection with one of the questions in the Slovak Referendum on the Family in 2015. The first part of the article describes the approach of the ethics of care inspired by the work of Joan Tronto and other scholars as an analytic framework for the study of public policies. By means of critical frame analysis, the article also examines the subjectivity of children and young people in narrative interviews and looks at how these dominant actors define the provision of this education as a form of care. The article explores what needs, problems, and risks political actors ascribe to children and young people within the frame of these narratives and what features of argumentation are shared by these discursive frameworks. The article’s objective is to analyse media representations around the time of the referendum in order to identify new issues for public education policy, in which sex education plays an important but problematic role.