Teachers and school principals need to monitor the details too. In an all-boy senior school in Chennai, at a Sex Ed workshop presented by a non-government organization there were references to ‘experiments’ being ‘alright’, because, ‘this is the only way to find out once and for all what your sexual preference is’. The teacher, also a parent in the same school and sitting behind as an observer, stepped in and pertinently pointed out that this would create social and gender anarchy as it was encouraging the boys to be both immoral and bisexual.

At a Mumbaii college the Sex Ed questions were equally loaded in favour of sexual experimentation. The college principal disallowed the two-day workshop from going ahead, dryly noting that there was more to Sex Ed than the act of sex itself. He added that he did not want his students to be identifying themselves as practitioners of safe sexual acts but as people who cared about their partners and as professionals in comprehensive fields which would help them get ahead with their future.

In other words: a life which goes much beyond ejaculation and orgasm. The kind of Sex Ed for kids which would help them understand that sex is not about penetration or not, good sex or bad sex, or less or more; but loving and cherishing, holding and hugging, warmth and real friendship. Do even the parents know and understand this?

Dr Shekhar Seshadri of Nimhans is also working in the direction of young adults, specifically young males in colleges, understanding that there is more to being a man than penetrative sex and sexual violence. He has been closely involved with the conceptualization and story board of the four nation masculinity film project, supported by Unicef and Save the Children. This masculinity project has short films by documentary film-makers Rahul Roy of India, Farjad Nabi and Mazhar Zaidi of Pakistan, Tsering Rhitar and Kesang Tseten of Nepal and Manzare Hassin of Bangladesh. The films address the different issues which frustrate and frighten young men in these countries; the films do not directly address Child Sexual Abuse but anything that can help the sexually uncertain male deal with his confusion and contradictions can go a long way towards protecting a child from sexual abuse.

Dr Seshadri is similarly working towards true masculinity awareness workshops in colleges, as also corporations, around the country. Says he, ‘There has to be an alternative model to masculinity. We cannot have parents telling little boys, “Why are you crying like a girl?” We should not allow teachers to separate boys and girls on the playground, this is really a tragedy because the boys grow up losing out on the friendship of so many women. It needs to be said out very loud that sex is not about making love and making love is not about penetration, ejaculation and orgasm. It needs to be understood quickly that genital sex cannot be connoted as mainstream sexuality and that virtue cannot reside only in a woman’s vagina, it can well be in a male body. Virtue, after all, is an internal state, virginity is a choice and the vagina is an anatomical structure. There are two messages which need to be changed. That maleness is not a natural endowment, rather a precarious state which you must achieve at all cost. That the penis has a mind of its own and once aroused it has to do its own thing.’