Nerve Endings Firing Away

Sex education has been making the news lately; not that it never fails to when it pops up in conversations. Barack Obama was at the Planned Parenthood Conference and remarked that sex education was the right thing to do for kindergarteners and added that it should be age-appropriate and meant primarily to help kids guard against potential pedophiles. While if the government should be involved in such an endeavor is a different matter, crackpot Romney spun it to make it sound as if Obama was asking to teach tiny tots about sexual intercourse which the Republican base was only too happy to lap it up.

Unfortunately, Romney couldn’t understand the gravity of Obama’s concerns considering he made those remarks only a day after the courts order the LA Catholic Archdiocese to cough up an astounding amount of $600 million to nearly 500 victims of sexual abuse. So you can imagine the problem of child sex abuse is no laughing matter considering the vanguards of morality are involved in perpetrating such crimes. I’m sure this is just the tip of the iceberg and there exist thousands of cases that go unreported or even unmentioned. So would sex education to warn children as old as 5 years old be useful in preventing such crimes? Perhaps but as long as the parents take it upon themselves to do the teaching. I’m not sure sex education for children that young in school would go down quite that well.

Unfortunately in India, parents shy away from sex education of any kind and only a small minority of schools offer sex education and even then, it is taught only in the latter years to giggling and red-faced teenagers. I am not even sure the teachers are doing it right. In fact, I’m quite sure that the health checkups that we are subjected to in schools are also at best a token gesture and do not achieve anything substantial. Just today, I came across this horrific news in an prominent Delhi School [via India Uncut]:

Students of Class VI and VII at Sardar Patel Vidyalaya had been called for a medical check-up earlier this week and doctors asked them to undress.

The girls and boys — most of them aged 11 or 12 — complained that their “private parts” were “measured” to check whether the “growth was natural”.

Although hardly sex education, this news is wrong at so many levels. Not only is it intrusive at a personal level but also reflects misguided notions of health by the so-called doctors. Can we ever get it right? Have you ever had appropriate sex education in your schools?