Sex education in schools in India still tends to be a taboo topic with a set of parents. In fact, it is this set that stops several schools all over the country from imparting sex education to their students, the principals of such schools complain of the educated middle and upper-class parents of their pupils who would much rather not have sex education in schools for fear that their children will turn ‘naughty’. The children themselves, though, want sex education. Or as they tend to call it: Sex Ed.

In a March 2000 poll survey conducted by Mumbaii’s Bhavans College through a cross-section of students, teachers and parents from the city’s schools on compulsory Sex Ed in schools, 62.23 per cent of the students voted for it. Possibly fearing that they would have to give a test or examination on Sex Ed as an additional subject, 29.13 per cent of the students feel it should be optional. More than the students are the teachers, 71 per cent of the teaching community feel Sex Ed must be made compulsory in Mumbaii’s schools. An important statistic this: teachers continue to feel that they have a responsibility to fulfill, besides their duty, that of the psychological health of the children they teach; possibly this happens because teachers are by now used to parents expecting miracles in schools while facilitating very few themselves and at home. ‘What,’ parents are known to protest, ‘are the teachers doing?’ Well, what the parents are doing is evident in the next set of statistics; 66.52 per cent of the parents say Sex Ed in schools is a good idea. Why? Because they find they cannot discuss the subject at home with their children. Why? Because their own parents could not discuss it with them. Why cannot they learn from the mistakes and omissions of their own parents and start afresh with their children? No reply to that. Well? Replies the father of a twelve-year-old son who agrees with the parents in the survey, ‘Okay, admitted that we are like our parents, but that does not mean our children have to be like their parents. Therefore, it is better they get their information from their schools on sex and the risks associated with it. These are the days of Aids, our children must understand.’

A small percentage of the parents, of course, continue to oppose Sex Ed in schools, at home or, indeed, anywhere else; the reason they give in the survey, ‘Against our Indian culture’. Centuries of tradition and glorious heritage winning over Child Sexual Abuse and Aids information here.

Parents like these tend not to live in real time, and there are such ‘culturally sensitive’ parents everywhere in India. When workshop organizers conduct Child Sexual Abuse sensitization programmes in schools, parents are invariably wary but the children almost always respond with alacrity. Like when Jabala of Calcutta ran a similar programme in city schools, several children disclosed their sexual abuse and requested the workers of Jabala to speak with their parents about it; they also asked for one-to-one counselling so that they could absorb what had happened to them.