My convent school in Delhi had an annual ritual. With much embarrassment on the part of the nuns, girls from the senior school would be led into the auditorium to watch a singularly uninformative documentary on the birds and the bees.
And I do mean the birds and the bees, because close- ups of them featured strongly in this scheme of sexual education. At the end of this ordeal, punctuated by much giggling, we had learned a smidgeon about the menstrual cycle, and imbibed a general sense that sex was a mysterious, possibly dirty rite reserved for the married.
I finally gleaned the basics about young lust and hormones when I moved to Calcutta, where my classmates were fearsomely knowledgeable compared to their counterparts in Delhi. Their knowledge, however, was accumulated from overheard wisdom, a few dubious books, many Mills and Boons and some dirty jokes, so it wasn?t very reliable. The Encyclopaedia Britannica filled in the gaps, but unfortunately I read the article on sexual reproduction in pigeons without discovering the article on humans a few pages down.
It?s been two decades since I was in school, and very little has changed. We still refuse to teach our children about sex, on the grounds that this would promote immorality. (Oddly enough, we teach them history without worrying that this might promote revolutions.) We hope that what they don?t know they can?t get up to. This policy works so well that the latest ministry of health and family welfare report on the Indian population says: ?Sexual relations among adolescents tend to start early, involve multiple partners and often are casual.? Most teens don?t know much about contraception, have no idea how to use a condom; ?non-consensual sex? is far more common than we think; abortion rates among teenagers are very high.
In other words, we?ve successfully taught teenagers that sex is dirty, that it has little to do with love, that contraception is irrelevant, and that your sexual partner is someone to be treated with disrespect. Fear, secrecy, ignorance and shame: is this really what we want teens to learn about lovemaking?
An argument I often hear is that teaching teenagers about sexual education amounts to giving them permission to behave like randy rabbits. If you tell them how to use a condom, you?re giving them permission to use one. And if all you?re going to teach teens is the mechanics of sex, then yes, the message you?re going to send out is that sex education begins and ends with the prevention of unwanted pregnancies or sexually transmitted diseases.
Many teachers have been suggesting that there?s another way to teach children about sex. One that would take them through the history of gender equality, that would explain the mysteries of the body, that would involve a discussion of sexual choices, and most important, one that would encourage children to respect themselves first. You need to teach children that sexual freedom isn?t to be taken lightly; that the flip side of freedom is responsibility. Right now, it?s only their hormones doing the talking; perhaps it?s time to include their brains and hearts in the conversation.
