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China's kids: sex ignorance
Dwight DanielsChinadaily.com.cn Updated: 2005-10-10 15:25 Chinese kids being influenced by the West isn't
news. Many sport the baggy pants, tinted hair, pierced body parts, and listen to
hip-hop and make all the right dance moves.
Dwight
Daniels | But when it comes to their bodies and
sex, they could still learn a little something.
That's because kids in China are reaching puberty at a younger and younger
age, according to researchers. Yet most youngsters here have little
understanding of sex and aren't emotionally ready to deal with it.
A recent survey shows the nation's one-child family's "princes" and
"princesses" are developing an awareness of life slower than their counterparts
did when a similar survey was first conducted 15 years ago.
Yang Xiong, a Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences researcher who collaborated
on the study, told the Shanghai Daily the survey focused on the physiological
and psychological situations children from one-child families, especially
addressing how kids feel toward sex and how their understanding of sex changed
with time.
What Yang and other sociologists found among the 3,000 youths questioned from
Shanghai, Beijing, Guangzhou, Shenyang, and Wuhan was that kids are generally
emotionally unready for entering the turbulent years of puberty because of
over-protective parents. Many Chinese moms and dads are apparently fearful about
talking to their children about sex or puberty, and, instead of overcoming that
anxiety, place their heads firmly in the sand and hope for the best.
This situation is made even worse by the poor sex education offered in
Chinese schools, where tongue-tied educators speak in riddles or use indirect
language, never getting to the issues in ways kids can understand them.
"Present parents never received proper sex education, so their knowledge
comes from life experience. Many are unable to answer their children's
questions," Yang told an interviewer.
A tidbit in China Daily's renowned China Scene column illustrated this only
too well. A couple in a small, remote town had been married for a year and
hadn't had a child. Under pressure from both sets of in-laws, they finally
couldn't take it. They went to see the town doctor.
"Why," the man asked, "hasn't my wife had a baby?"
A few careful questions from the doc revealed the problem. The husband and
wife had no inkling of what "sex" was, or that this secret subject was required
for baby making. A basic anatomy lesson was quickly given, and the couple lived
happily ever after.
Sadly, this is not as silly as it sounds -- even in a land where 1.3 billion
people reside. Sex is still a taboo topic. This is all too obvious even in
classes at major Chinese universities, where embarrassed twitters are heard
among students when topics like pre-marital relations, condoms and co-habitation
are mentioned. More sophisticated students in the West wouldn't blink an eye.
This would be all too charming if it weren't for all the harm it does. As
physical maturity keeps advancing, girls are a particularly vulnerable group,
and they are still immature psychologically, said Huang Hong from the Shanghai
No. 2 Medical University said.
The survey indicates girls had their first period at the average age of 13.38
in 1989, and the age dropped to 12.7 in 2004. It found that 19.8 percent of
girls said they were "scared" of their first menstruation, compared with just
11.77 percent in 1989. That's a slide backwards to ignorance that is reflected
in other areas, like the HIV/AIDS epidemic.
Does anyone really think that a young girl - who really doesn't even
understand what's going on when she first menstruates - will use birth control
if put into an awkward situation where she should? Many don't have a clue at
that tender age how to control of their bodies.
Hong cited the case of a 15-year-old girl who delivered a baby boy and then
accidentally killed him while trying to keep her pregnancy a secret.
China can do better than this, and some of its largest cities have been
trying. Shanghai, Beijing and Chongqing began testing new sex education programs
for middle school girls - generally 12 to 14 years old - last year.
But that may be already too late. Becoming realistic about the need for sex
education as early as primary school - with at least some general information
offered to both boys and girls (and parents allowed to participate) - is worth a
try.
This is not a moral or cultural issue. It just makes sense.
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