In recent years we have witnessed growing mobilizations against gender and sexuality rights in many European countries. These mobilizations seem particularly prominent in countries of Central and Eastern Europe, such as Croatia which experienced some of the earliest anti-gender mobilizations against sexuality education. One of the big victories of the Croatian anti-gender movement occurred in the same year Croatia joined the European Union, in 2013, in the shape of a successful constitutional referendum defining marriage as a union between a woman and a man, when at the same time many other European countries were legalizing same-sex marriage. Belgium is among the countries that legalized same-sex marriage first in the world, and it is also often presented as an example of good practices of holistic sexuality education in schools – primarily in Flemish Belgian schools. This is just one of examples of critical differences between Croatia and Belgium (Flanders) on the issues of gender and sexuality rights, despite the fact that the 20^th century Belgium was, like Croatia today, very much characterized by a considerable influence of the Catholic Church on social norms and values. This state of affairs raises many questions about the role of socio-institutional context in the development of sexual and gender rights, or mobilizations against them, including also the questions on how institutions and social norms contribute to interpretations of messages about gender and sexuality among ordinary people – citizens of societies with different institutionalized norms and practices. These questions are at heart of the Sense AGENDa project, a comparative study of Croatia and Belgium (Flanders), which examines how citizens interpret messages about gender and sexuality differently in different socio-institutional contexts. This presentation will focus on the first findings and reflections from the earliest stages of this project, and it will highlight the issues and considerations of the Flemish and Croatian individuals related to sexuality education.

Tanja Vučković Juroš received her PhD in Sociology from Indiana University Bloomington. She is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA) post-doctoral research fellow at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of Zagreb, where she is conducting a project on how citizens interpret anti-gender messages in Croatia and Belgium. Her research is situated mostly at the intersections of cultural and political sociology, with a deep interest in families and sexualities. Her most recent articles appear in Sexualities, Europe-Asia Studies, Gender, Place & Culture and Journal of Family Issues. She is currently also serving as the editor-in-chief of the Croatian Sociological Review