Fellow's Profile
Fellow's Profile
Improving sexual education and wellbeing for adults with intellectual disabilities
With pleasure: Improving sex education for adults with intellectual disabilities
2025
South West
I am a mental health social worker, disability advocate, group facilitator and queer person from Brighton. I have completed two master's degrees in sociological and anthropological fields, and I have begun training in psychodynamic relationship therapy.
My Fellowship focuses on empowering adults with intellectual disabilities to realise their right to meaningful sexual and romantic relationships. The intersection between disability and sexuality is couched in risk-mitigation and safeguarding narratives and seen as a problem to be solved or pathologized. Adults with intellectual disabilities are often infantilised as having no capacity to consent to safe sex practices and as a result are left to navigate experiences of intimacy with little to no support. These adults are entitled to access empowering education about their body and the opportunities for pleasure that it can provide.
I hope to learn from the progressive attempts to tackle this stigma in Australasia and Scandinavia with a view to ultimately developing a sex positive, disability-inclusive education service where talking about sex is about pleasure and wellness, not a source of shame and fear.
When travelling in Australia for her Fellowship, Rosie Richards attended the Winston Churchill Trust in Australia's, 60th anniversary convention for Fellows.
By Rosie Richards, 13 November 2025
All Reports are copyright © the author. The moral right of the author has been asserted. The views and opinions expressed by any Fellow are those of the Fellow and not of the Churchill Fellowship or its partners, which have no responsibility or liability for any part of them.
When travelling in Australia for her Fellowship, Rosie Richards attended the Winston Churchill Trust in Australia's, 60th anniversary convention for Fellows.
By Rosie Richards, 13 November 2025
All Reports are copyright © the author. The moral right of the author has been asserted. The views and opinions expressed by any Fellow are those of the Fellow and not of the Churchill Fellowship or its partners, which have no responsibility or liability for any part of them.
