‘Customise’ sex education
Rather than blindly adopting western sex education programmes, we should have adolescent plans catering to our culture and area-specific needs, says Seema Bhatia

Sex education should address adolescent issues in different states of India

An eighth grade girl got very excited when she found that her parents were leaving her alone for a night to attend to some urgent social obligation. She invited her boyfriend to spend the night together. They spent an intimate night, experimenting, exploring and repenting. The anguished boy couldn’t fathom how to help the girl who started bleeding profusely. The children tried everything possible but as dawn broke, the girl, who by now had bled excessively, gave up the battle for life, leaving behind broken parents, a mentally unstable friend and shocked teachers and friends.

The incident was brushed under the carpet to avoid shame and humiliation. It has been long forgotten as life moves on, as young children look for more excitement and stimulation each passing day. If one really had the time and inclination, it would be an eye-opener to sit with some 10 or 11-year-olds and hear about their social interactions in the classrooms.

Interestingly, many a game played in the classes has a sexual undertone. For instance, in the game Truth or Dare the child who gets the dare is asked to perform daring feats like propose to a classmate, kiss or maybe even pull someone’s pants down. The creativity in sexual innuendos is boundless. To have a boyfriend is a status quotient, the girl who receives maximum proposals is a winner and the boy whose proposal is accepted is envied bitterly.

A heart-to-heart conversation revealed an interesting happening in one of the seventh grade classes. Bhairavi, a pretty-looking girl had been pestered with countless boys in her class and outside proposing to her every day. Finally one day, she gave in and accepted Vaibhav as her boyfriend. As the news became public, the class had at least a dozen boys literally weeping and being booed by the rest for being such losers in life.

It may sound funny but most of these children aren’t even aware what they are getting into. If one observed these children closely, it becomes quite evident that all that they are trying to do is to act grown up. They are imitating adult ways and seem too much in a hurry to be ‘in control’.

Are we prepared to have 10 and 11-year-old adults around us dictating their terms and conditions to parents and teachers all the time? If yes, we can continue living our lives as we have been, but if the answer is an emphatic "no" then something needs to be done. We already have enough policies and programmes for adolescents to massage our inflated egos. What we desperately need is application in reality.

Application can happen only if there is a comprehensive research to form statistical analysis of the problem. The solutions have to be then customised according to different populations for acceptance and integration into a complex system such as ours.

The Adolescent Education Programme, inspired by the Sex Education and the Abstinence Till Marriage programme in the US, had United Nations Population Funds as a major partner in its implementation. The underlying reasons for the urgency were the increasing HIV-AIDS cases in India.

The figure quoted at the time in 2004 by UNAIDS was 5 million which amounts to 1 per cent of the total Indian population. Three years hence, we receive new HIV-AIDS affected figures from the UNAIDS and, surprisingly, they have been reduced to 2.5 million, which means not a single new case of HIV-AIDS has been reported in all these years.

We Indians essentially lack the initiative to collect comprehensive data to form statistics on which we can form policies that suit our needs. It serves our purpose to borrow ideas and models from developed countries and apply them blindly to our system and feel good about them. It sounds fine as long as it’s highways and malls we are copying — they can be restructured if we go wrong but can we say the same for our kids?

It may be disheartening for some to accept that even Americans have gone wrong in a lot of their policies, even when they were based on scientifically collected data. Their ‘sex education programme’ is one such example, yet we chose to copy ‘the model’ page by page, stamped it with Department of Education, Delhi, and shoved it down the aided and unaided CBSE schools.

In such a case, should we carry on with Adolescent Education Programme (AEP) that essentially addresses American youth? Or should we start afresh, with collecting separate data for every Indian state’s unique adolescent issues (Assam is fighting drugs, whereas Bihar is weighed down by the practice of early marriages) and have a comprehensive solution pool by the respective states. These can then go through expert analysis and be integrated into classrooms without much ado.

This would save not only a large chunk of tax payers’ money that goes into running such government programmes but also a national programme from becoming sheer entertainment for children and a headache for the administration.