India Flat Out Refuses Sex Education
Hello everyone! Sorry there hasn’t been a sex ed update in awhile. But after some grueling weeks of out-of-town work and then a lovely vacation to Hawaii for ten days, I’m back and I bring with me a slew of disgraceful news regarding sex education worldwide.
In India, teenage pregnancy is rampant. We may not hear about it often because, for quite a few of these teen girls, their pregnancies occur within the confines of marriage. That is because nearly 50% of the women in India get married before the age of 18. That is just an incredible statistic to me. Still, there has been a push to establish some sort of sexual health education program in the country.
This year, the Ministry of Human Resource Development submitted a proposal to the Parliament to implement a comprehensive sex education program called the “Adolescence Education Programme.” A few months ago, a parliamentary committee on petitions rejected the proposal. The reason they gave for the decision was that India’s “social and cultural ethos are such that sex education has absolutely no place in it”
Excuse me, India Parliament, but your vision of your social ethos and the fact that nearly half your women are married before 18 and more than 50% of children claimed to have experienced sexual abuse, don’t really seem to add up. I’d say sex education definitely has a place. However, this is where it gets sticky. If it’s part of their culture to get married before 18 and pop out lots of kids and not be educated about making healthy decisions and taking care of yourself, how can we come in as citizens of a bigger, more developed, outside nation and say that their culture is wrong? Do we have that right?
Personally, I don’t think it’s about rights. On some level, it may not be ethical to tell a culture how to act but if over half the children in the country have been sexually abused, something is just not right and change needs to occur.
How can America tout change in other cultures though when our own culture would directly contradict our efforts? Why do I say this? Well, a study released last week found that out of all the developed nations in the world, the US has the highest teen pregnancy rate. Not only that but the US rate was double the average for all developed nations.
The current US rate is 42 births for every 1,000 girls aged 15 to 19, while the overall rate for developed countries is 21 per 1,000, the internationally-known non-governmental research organization, Population Reference Bureau (PRB), reported.
This is disgraceful. We are arguably the most powerful country in the world and we have statistics like that? However, it’s not just those facts that could stop us from tooting our cultural horn either. It lies in our own culture as well. The Christian Right, which has far more sway over the American public then most of us would like, has changed their messaging around sex education now that all these studies been released proving Abstinence-Only education is ineffective. The new message? Just get married younger kids! That’s right, just marry them off as soon as you can! Anybody starting to see the India-US correlation?
So, with this kind of hoohah going on in our own country, it is hard to march on over to India and tell them to stop marrying their daughters off at 15. Is there a solution? Are there any steps we can take to at least change something? Europe has once again come through and shown us that there is something to be done.
In recent years, Croatia has been having an issue with their sex education curriculum as well. Claims have been made that
the state-sponsored sex-education program TeenStar teaches that condoms do not prevent HIV and STDs, that gay relationships are “deviant” and that stay-at-home mothers make for better families.
This is just horrifying. BUT…there is a silver lining in this story. This atrocious curriculum caught the eye of human rights organizations in both London and New York City. In 2007, they took legal action against Croatia all the way to the European Committee for Social Rights which monitors compliance with the Council of Europe’s European Social Charter. Recently, the committee ruled on the claim stating that
parts of the curriculum “stigmatize homosexuals and are based upon negative, distorted, reprehensible and degrading stereotypes.”
This is a fantastic step and a first of its kind. As more of these developments take place and more of these horrifying sex education programs are brought to light, hopefully a global movement of implementing comprehensive sex education will occur. And hopefully the US will be at the forefront of this globalized movement. We’re gettin’ there folks, one school district at a time.
1Shanman
wrote on 20 August 2009 at 20:55
“If it’s part of their culture to get married before 18 and pop out lots of kids and not be educated about making healthy decisions and taking care of yourself, how can we come in as citizens of a bigger, more developed, outside nation and say that their culture is wrong? Do we have that right?”
Whoa there! You are making a lot of problematic assumptions and judgments. You’ve depicted an entire country as uneducated, unhealthy, barefoot, and pregnant. You’ve also managed to depict the U.S. as healthier and more educated than India. Although the US has high pregnancy rates and has invested in abstinence only education you do not describe it like you describe India. Perhaps this is because as a citizen of the U.S. you know that the views of the government do not represent the views or practices of every single citizen.Like the U.S. India’s government, culture, and citizenry is complex. Your refusal to acknowledge this complexity supports and perpetuates discourse about America’s “greatness” and the backwardness of the rest of the world.
2freewomyn
wrote on 20 August 2009 at 21:54
Hello Caitlin – welcome back! We missed you, but it sounds like you got a much needed break.
There are some interesting things happening in this post. First off, I agree with Shanman. I think that we need to be careful of how we characterize other countries. What is the source for the statistics that you are citing?
I appreciate that you brought up the high teen pregnancy rates in the US. But I think we need to talk about some other US stats. One in three girls is sexually abused, and one in six boys is sexually abused. (For more info, check out “The Courage to Heal,” by Ellen Bass and Laura Davis.) One in six women in the US will be sexually assaulted in their life time. That’s one rape every 2 minutes in this country. (source: RAINN) Clearly, the US shouldn’t go throwing stones in glass houses.
I think you did try to make this point with your stats. But it’s really unfortunate that you had such a dismissive characterization of Indian culture at the beginning of the post, because I think it detracts from what you were trying to say.
3Yasmin Nair
wrote on 20 August 2009 at 22:39
Shanman and Serena have made excellent points.
I’d also advise you to look closely at the cultural imperialism that clearly drives your entire narrative, an imperialism that’s glaringly obvious in parts like these:
“…how can we come in as citizens of a bigger, more developed, outside nation and say that their culture is wrong? Do we have that right?”
And
“And hopefully the US will be at the forefront of this globalized movement. We’re gettin’ there folks, one school district at a time.”
Seriously? You think the U.S., where 50 million are uninsured, and most of them will die because of a lack of health care; nearly 15 million are undocumented and have no rights and can be hounded like foxes on the borders or in their own homes; where millions *with* medical insurance are driven into bankruptcy and homelessness because the insurance companies wipe them out with constant lawsuits and challenges; where most areas have little to no public transportation, compelling people to drive in polluting vehicles that they can barely afford; where millions of children – in an ostensible “first world” – suffer from “food insecurity” or outright hunger; where both straight and queer kids are liable to be be infected with STDs and possibly even die because of the lack of sexual education about sexuality, condoms, HIV/AIDS; where homeless shelters are bursting at the seams; where jails and Wal Marts are actually considered generators of employment in small town America; where the Prison Industrial Complex is a growth industry…you seriously think you have the right to even suggest that the U.S should be at the forefront of anything?
There’s that old saying, or maybe it’s one I just made up: Fix your own house before you go falling off the roofs of others. We in the U.S would do well to remember that we have hell of a lot of crap to fix here. Have you been in Hawaii (a constant reminder of the U.S’s astonishingly brutal past and present colonialism) so long that you can’t remember what the U.S is really like? And do you really think that “a global movement of implementing comprehensive sex education” is the right step, even if it were to happen, given the myriad complexities of every single country’s particular concerns and issues with regard to gender and sexuality?
I don’t write this to stop anybody from writing about issues and conditions in other countries. But I think it behooves us all to consider what frameworks we use to judge what goes on elsewhere. I mean this regardless of whether or not you’ve spent time in India, and regardless of how many South Asians you may have spoken to. It’s completely possible to be a deluded colonial imperialist even if you spent decades in a country. I hope you realise that the U.S or Europe are not the saviours of the world – and positing them as such replicates some dangerous and immensely racialised hierarchies.
4John
wrote on 21 August 2009 at 1:41
Hard to believe
5swati
wrote on 21 August 2009 at 5:12
funnily, we had a few, very basic, had sex education classes back in 1991 in India. That too in a convent school.
6Leslie
wrote on 21 August 2009 at 14:03
Yasmin and Shanman, did you read the whole column? I think what Caitlin is saying is that the US has no business telling other countries what to do when our own statistics are no better. As she says:
“How can America tout change in other cultures though when our own culture would directly contradict our efforts?”
Instead, it takes agencies like the European Committee for Social Rights with the ethical authority to review and censure as they did in Croatia. Meanwhile, we must continue to try to clean up our own act, “one school district at a time,” but that doesn’t mean we can’t see the errors of other countries. We can all learn from each other, can’t we? Being a model is something to aspire to. I agree with Yasmin that then to impose that model would be imperialism, but no one is saying that we should do it by force.
7REBETE706
wrote on 22 August 2009 at 11:58
Seriously? This is the same country that didnt have actors and actresses kissing on screen until 4 years ago. First and foremost as an indian woman myself, I do not think that these blanket solutions work across the board. Every country and situation is different. The US does not need to engage in this kind of soft – touted imperialism.
Women and Men marry at a young age for many reasons in India. For the most part, unlike our culture in the States, the divorce rate is extremely low abroad because of the family values that Indians hold in high regard. Young marriages happen when a family can afford to pay a dowry. It also happens because naturally, people want a young bride instead of an hold hag (starting around 30). You are more likely to have a healthy pregnancy at a young age. You have to remember that there is no health care system in India like the alleged one we have here.
I think that this push for “sex – education” should be up to each country. I believe a lot of your stats regarding child abuse probably also include the ever rampant sex trade industry (which its mainly American men that are the buyers). As long as government beaucrats turn a blind eye towards these kinds of abuses and claim its in the national cultural interest, these abuses will continue. There needs to be grass roots movements among Indians themselves to change these. The last thing they want is other kinds of people breathing down their necks.
India has already shown it does not like hypocrisy (NPT, CTBT, etc.). So yes, you are right, we need to get our ducks in a room before we go on to another pond.
8Caitlin
wrote on 24 August 2009 at 13:23
First off, I will apologize for some of the language I used in this post. I understand that it could be seen as offensive. However, I want to point out a few things.
The whole point of this post was to explain that the US DOES NOT have the right to tell other countries how to manage their sex education policies when we can’t even manage our own. However much I might want it to, comprehensive sex education is obviously not fitting well in to our social and cultural ethos either.
My main concern when I heard those statistics about so many being married under the age of eighteen was whether or not they had they made the choice to marry. If that is what these girls and boys wanted, than fantastic. I am a romantic by nature and if these teens have found who they want to be with early in life, that’s just lovely.
For me it hinges on whether or not every teen in the world is getting the accurate information they need to make the best choices for themselves. By India’s government deciding not to allow for the widespread opportunity to receive that information, I was a bit worried. I hope that teens have other ways to get information so they can be as informed as possible about their bodies and their rights. But I don’t think the US should go in and do it. It’s not our place.
I agree with REBETE in saying that change should be a grassroots effort, whether within that country or from outside nonprofits that are not affiliated with any government and have obviously had the time to become familiar with Indian culture and customs, unlike I have.
That is why I gave the example of Croatia. No one seemed to comment on that form of intervention. Maybe that is the solution. It’s happening in this country too. Nonprofits are stepping in to school districts all over to prevent misinformation from being spouted off to impressionable youth. I know this for a fact because that is what I do day in and day out. Hopefully, one day every school district in the US will be educating their students with accurate sexual health information.
Lastly, I am not imperialistic. I don’t think the US should be a model for anything right now. I personally get so sickened by this country that sometimes I want to pack up and move to the lovely socialized Norway. But I hope that one day, the US can be a model for comprehensive sex education and serve as an example to those countries that CHOOSE to implement comprehensive programs.
So I am sorry for representing the Indian culture in that way. I personally don’t see them that way at all. I don’t know enough about the culture to have made firm opinions on it. It is just my belief and wish that all teens could be given accurate information regarding their sexual health. For me, it is a shame that other countries, including much of the US, don’t wish to do the same.
9freewomyn
wrote on 24 August 2009 at 19:00
Cailtin, I’m really glad that you got a chance to clarify your position.
10thirdworldfeminist
wrote on 25 August 2009 at 12:13
I appreciate the comments put forth that talk about the imperialist tone of this article. As an Indian feminist, I find the article extremely hard to read. Yes, like the U.S and most parts of the world, India has its own patriarchal culture. Yes, like the U.S and other parts of the world, child abuse, sexual violence and domestic violence are issues that need to be addressed in India. What I seldom hear talked about however, is the incredible woman led movement in India to deal with these issues. Additionally, I rarely hear or read mainstream feminists talk about the role of colonization and imperialism in perpetuating gender violence.
I would urge the writer, to do research into the high level of organization amongst feminists in India and look at some of the incredible work being done and perhaps figure out what we can learn from the organizing happening in India.
Here are a few that come to mind off the top of my head.
http://www.aidwaonline.com/
http://www.sewa.org/
http://www.karmayog.org/brochuresofNGOs/brochuresofNGOs_12281.htm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/7068875.stm
11freewomyn
wrote on 26 August 2009 at 19:00
Thirdworldfeminist – thanks for sharing those links. I, for one, will be checking them out.