Mission Statement
Mission: The European Sexuality Resource Center aims to improve the quality of sexual life by promoting networking and the sharing of information on issues related to sexual health, sexual rights and sexual well-being at the European level.
Purpose: The European Sexuality Resource Center promotes a dialogue and provides support to a wide community of researchers, policy makers and activists both within the European Union and outside.
Composition: The European Sexuality Resource Center is an association of partners, which are organizations both in The Netherlands and in the European Union (EU) working within the field of sexual well-being and sexual health in Europe and outside the region, and individual members with a particular expertise in these fields.
Location: The European Sexuality Resource Center is located at the International Information Centre and Archives for the Women’s Movement in Amsterdam.
Field of operation of the European Sexuality Resource Center
The European Sexuality Resource Center works on issues of sexuality in the broadest sense. As a working definition it adopts that used by the World Health Organization (2002):
"Sexuality is a central aspect of being human throughout life and encompasses sex, gender identities and roles, sexual orientation, eroticism, pleasure, intimacy and reproduction. Sexuality is experienced and expressed in thoughts, fantasies, desires, beliefs, attitudes, values, behaviors, practices, roles, and relationships. While sexuality can include all of these dimensions, not all of them are always experienced or expressed. Sexuality is influenced by the interaction of biological, psychological, social, economic, political, cultural, ethical, legal, historical, and religious and spiritual factors."
Sexuality is seen as different from but interacting with gender relations and intersecting with other relations of power, such as class, ethnicity, race and age. The ESRC therefore respects the diversity within the EU and works from an intersectional, multicultural and multireligious perspective that transcends the boundaries of the nation state and interacts with global networks, discourses and information streams and partners.
The European Sexuality Resource Center works from a perspective in which human, women’s and sexual rights are respected and promoted. These rights are contained in but not limited to international human and women’s rights conventions, declarations and other consensus documents and include the following rights of all persons, free of coercion, discrimination and violence, to:
Objectives of the European Sexual Resource Center
The European Sexuality Resource Center provides e-based services in the form of a website, to which all partners and members are linked, an e-based magazine and an e-based peer–reviewed journal. With or without its partners it will also provide training on issues of sexuality and the information services related to that, and stimulate research, particularly on policy issues.
The European Sexuality Resource Center works within the intersection of culture, politics and science, promoting human, women’s and sexual rights both within the European Union and internationally. Topics it will address include but are not restricted to:
