Healthy Relationships Act of 2017

Healthy Relationships Act of 2017

This bill authorizes the Administration for Children & Families of the Department of Health and Human Services to award grants to public and private entities for the exclusive purpose of providing qualified sexual risk avoidance education to youth and their parents.

Such education must address specified topics, including:

• benefits associated with personal responsibility and healthy decisionmaking;
• the advantage of reserving sexual activity for marriage;
• the skills needed to resist the harms associated with pornography and pervasive, sex-saturated culture;
• the foundational components of healthy relationships; and
• how to resist and avoid sexual coercion and dating violence.

Priority in awarding grants must be given to applicants who propose sexual risk avoidance education programs that will regularly reinforce the sexual risk avoidance message in both the middle and high school grades and will promote parent-child communication on the benefits of avoiding all sexual risk.