Sex education a desperate need

My aunt teaches at another secondary school, this one is not a "prestige school" like my sister’s alma mater. She tells the story of another teacher missing half her students one day. She walked into what was supposed to be an empty classroom to find a group of boys each waiting their turn to have sex with the lone female student there. The girl has been labelled "special" in that her learning and mental faculties are not considered to be at the capacity believed normal for her age. The SEA exam had kept good its promise of a place in a secondary school, but the education being received is questionable.

I remember the case a number of years ago of a 12-year-old who had given birth. I had spoken to one of the reporters who had interviewed the girl and her family. They had known the child was being molested and had pretended they didn’t because the man supported the family and paid for the girl to go to school. The reporter said he cried when he’d asked the girl if she had any regrets and she said, yes, that she couldn’t breastfeed her baby because she didn’t have any breasts as yet.

There’s a little girl I know. She’s in Form I now so perhaps I shouldn’t call her little, but it’s difficult, seeing that I have known her from the month she was born. I changed her diapers, bathed her, seen her grow into a quietly intelligent, sensitive child. She is the unwitting recipient of a campaign of aggressive wooing from a boy in her school who is 17. He is in Form 2. These are a sample of my personal experiences and those of people that I know. Everyone has their own stories to tell, of classmates who got pregnant and had to drop out of school, victims of rape and incest who go on to continue the abuse and neglect of their bodies for it is all they know. And there is no single, simple cause and effect explanation for it, no one area that can take full blame for the abuse of sexuality that goes on in this country and is so rampant in our schools.

Certainly the education system has failed, accepting and unleashing into schools children who are for all purposes illiterate and who set to assert themselves in the few avenues they have available, the main one being their bodies, be it either in acts of violence or in acts of sex, which many times, are a form of violence.

Religion has failed with its often ambivalent approach to reality. No to sex education, no to birth control and no to abortion, a head in the sand approach that speaks of devotement of mind numbing ramifications.

Many families as the basic building blocks of society have botched things up. We are a society of people who can be overwhelmingly hypocritical in our approach to sex. We parade and flaunt our sexuality yet are woefully irresponsible towards it. There are women who don’t know how their menstrual cycles work; men who define their masculinity by how many illegitimate children they father.

Speaking with school children reveals a desperate ignorance that certainly has been handed down from the parents and is reflective of society at large.

There are girls who will tell you that they only have sex standing up as a guarantee against pregnancy. They are firm in their convictions. When asked what if this "fool proof" method fails, what would they do, they speak of the consumption of hot Guinness, hot Coke and barring that, blue soap.

Sexually transmitted diseases are not accounted for in this warped birth control. Most of them are convinced that one can tell whether someone is safe by looking at them. Many boys don’t even bother to consider the ramifications. Birth control is the woman’s concern.

The age old argument that the place for sex education is in the home and not the school has been made moot for sex has been brought into the classroom some time now. Teachers have always found themselves in the position where they must perform duties ideally left up to parents. Young people must be placed in a position where they can make informed decisions about their sexual health. In order to do so they must be aware of their rights as well as their responsibilities and they can only find out about this via a systematic and structured programme of sex education that begins at primary and continues into secondary level.

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