Sex education is always a hot topic among youth in China, but Zhang Meimei, a professor at Capital Normal University in Beijing, decided five months ago to take the next step and do something that she thought has been overdue for years: hold a sex education summer camp for pre-teenagers.

The 11- and 12-year-olds were to learn about puberty, how to befriend the opposite sex and how to "become popular in school."

Zhang knew it would be difficult to make parents understand her motives, and she was right.

Last month, she had to cancel the camp. Though many parents enquired about the camp, only 10 decided to enrol their children.

Why? The answer can be found in what two of the parents had to say: "It's embarrassing to send my child to a sex education camp when other children are going to an English or technology camp," and "I'm afraid the summer camp will make children think of things they should not."

"A typical Chinese parent just turns pale at the mention of sex," says Zhang, who has studied sex education for 16 years.

Ready for sex?

Chinese children today are already exposed to a lot of sex from TV shows, movies, the Internet, advertising and even news.

Zhang Xiaoji director of Green Apple House, a Beijing-based sex education centre says some children's questions are quite "advanced" for their age. "A junior middle school student once asked what oral sex was." But that has to be expected as fall-out of what has been happening in today's society. "What else do you expect with the sex scandal of Clinton splashed across newspaper headlines? Every kid seems to have heard of oral sex.

"Parents across China may still like to believe in the innocence of their wards, but youngsters' attitudes towards sex have changed. And the sooner we accept it, the better."

In a survey of 1,060 senior middle school students in Hangzhou, capital of East China's Zhejiang Province, about one-third said they had started dating, and 23 per cent said that it's OK to have sex at their age. In a survey by the Municipal Women's Federation of Beijing, 8 per cent of the girls aged between 13 and 19 said they had had sex.

Contrasted with the openness about sex is a lack of knowledge. In the Hangzhou survey, about one-third did not know what actions would cause pregnancy and two-thirds could not name the transmission methods of venereal diseases.

The teenage pregnancy rate is climbing in most Chinese cities. In the Beijing survey, 3 per cent of girls said they have been pregnant. Under-age girls accounted for about one-fourth of the 1.49 million abortions on the Chinese mainland in 2002, according to a report by the Xinhua News Agency.

Without proper guidance from adults, these teenagers are using TV programmes such as "Friends" and "Sex in the City" as primers on relationships and sex, says Zhang Xiaoji.

A Green Apple House survey shows that 70 per cent of under-age visitors learned about sex through magazines, movies, TV and the Internet, and 24 per cent by reading books. That means parents are source of information for only 1.7 per cent and 1.3 per cent of the children.

Leaving the children to explore on their own is dangerous, because the information they are gathering may be "unwholesome, inaccurate and incomplete," Zhang Xiaoji said.

Zhang Meimei agreed: "Teenagers want to know what it's like to be in love. They want to experience the beautiful feeling of being with the opposite sex. If we don't provide an age-appropriate behaviour model, then they have to imitate what happens in movies and TV shows."

Supply and demand

Middle schools in major Chinese cities do have puberty education in their curriculum. But surveys have repeatedly indicated that the students are unhappy with it.

The emphasis on academic performance and the fear of controversy have prompted many schools to make only a half-hearted effort to teaching students about sex. The result: Puberty lesson periods are used to teach other subjects, and students are told to read the textbooks at home - that is, if there's a textbook at all. A survey in Shenzhen, China's economic powerhouse in Guangdong Province, has found that one in every five middle schools doesn't have a puberty lesson textbook.

School-based sex education programmes have three problems, Zhang Xiaoji said: "Schools do not attach importance to sex education, there's no official textbook and the teachers are ill-trained."

Organizations such as Green Apple House are trying to fill in the gap. And more and more middle schools have started counselling services for students. "But the supply is far, far behind the demand," says Wang Lina, a member of the China Sexology Association's puberty education committee.

Better known as "Sister Siyu," Wang runs a popular sex education section of Tencent's QQ web portal (edu.qq.com/sexedu/sex.shtml). The website features a question-and-answer column and has even attracted people from Taiwan and Hong Kong.

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