Fears have been raised that sexual health may be at risk in India due to poor sex education. A recent survey found that some adults had many misconceptions about sex and often had very skewed views of various aspects of sexual wellbeing.
This was blamed on the fact that many parents don’t feel comfortable talking to their children about sex, and so children receive very little in the way of sex education. The problem is compounded by the fact that sex education classes are often not available to children in schools, leaving young people to learn about the facts of life from literature, movies, porn or the internet.
Sex education is not included in the curriculum, as a parliamentary committee decided that the topic should be excluded. Following a one and a half year debate, the committee, which was headed by the BJP’s M. Venkiah Naidu, announced that sexual education was ‘against the ethos of our society and would uproot the cultural values that we’ve cherished since the Verdic Age’. The committee also suggested that topics covering sexual wellness issues such as HIV/AIDS should be limited to Biology classes, and even then it should only be available to those in Class 12 upwards.
Sex education, as it currently stands, tends to be focused simply on the biological facts of sex, rather than any kind of emotional or relationship issues, and classes are separated into boys or girls and taught separately. As premarital sex is a strongly taboo subject, it can be hard for young people to talk about any concerns that they may have.
Abstinence-only sex education is the most generally taught form of advice, but it has many flaws as it does not take into account the fact that human nature and physiology is geared towards having sex.
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