Sex education failing young people: survey

• Source: Global Times
• [02:40 May 05 2010]
• Comments

By Fu Wen and Kang Juan

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A class on gay and lesbian studies at Fudan University in Shanghai has attracted an overflow crowd. The class is the first ever of its kind in China. Photo: The New York Times

Chinese youths are becoming more adventurous in their sexual activity, but ignorance is still a serious problem due to their insatiable demand for counseling and treatment services, the first nationwide survey on youth access to reproductive health in China showed Tuesday.

The preliminary findings of the survey, released by the Population Research Center of Peking University to the Global Times, showed that most of the 164 million unmarried young people on the Chinese mainland, aged 15-24 in 2009, are open to premarital sex, with two thirds of them accepting the behavior or not feeling strongly about it, while 22.4 percent said they had already experienced sexual intercourse.

In contrast to their tolerance of sexual behavior, only 4.4 percent of those questioned had correct knowledge of sexual and re-productive health, while 14.4 percent knew about HIV transmission and prevention.

The survey, carried out among 22,288 unmarried youths in 30 provinces of the Chinese mainland, excluding the Tibetan Autonomous Region, finds that around 60 percent of demands for counseling services and 50 percent of demands for treatment are unmet, with the top reason being embarrassment. Other important reasons are that people don't consider their condition to be serious enough and they don't know whom to consult.

The situation leads to more unsafe sexual behavior, accidental pregnancy and infection with HIV and other sexually transmitted diseases. Over 50 percent said they did not use contraceptive methods during their first sexual encounter, and, among females who had been sexually active, 21.3 percent became accidentally pregnant, of whom 91 percent resorted to abortion, the survey finds.

Li Bian, director of AIDS Prevention Education of Chinese Youth (APECY), founded by the China Charity Federation and the Chinese Society of Education, told the Global Times that he was not surprised by the findings, which reflect a worrying trend.

As unmarried young girls with unplanned pregnancies are normally embarrassed and afraid of asking for help from family, many of them resort to underground clinics, which increase the possibility of infection, he said.

"The worst situation in my memory is that of a girl who had her womb removed because of an abortion surgery with an unqualified doctor," he added.

Zhao Long, 23, a senior student at Tianjin Sports College, told the Global Times that he is open to premarital sex but he is not very clear how harmful it is for girls to have an abortion due to an accidental pregnancy.

"My early sex knowledge came from the television talking about preventing AIDS by using condoms when I was in secondary school," Zhao said. "Sex education in school is very rare. I only had one class as I can remember but I cannot remember what the teacher talked about."

"The sex education class was canceled in high school and at college," Zhao said, adding that at least three girls in his college had unplanned pregnancies this year, as far as he knew.

According to the survey, books and magazines, classmates and friends, school teachers, networking and film and TV were the five important sources of reproductive health knowledge, and the low awareness rate of young people's knowledge of sex and repro-ductive health might be a consequence of the inconsistent information in these informal channels.

Qi Suyuan, a doctor at Bayannaoer High School in North China's Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, said that she receives at least one report of accidental pregnancy every year from her school, and she believes that the actual number of such cases is even higher.

"More emphasis should be put on sex education in high schools but the Chinese tradi-tion to avoid talking about sex in public is still one of the biggest obstacles to pro-mote sex education in school," Qi sadi.

"I offer sex education for more than 3,000 students in school that is tailored for boys and girls separately, but each student could only get very limited information from one class," Qi conceded.

Chen Gong, a professor specializing in population and health at Peking University, who participated in the survey, said Tuesday that cross-discipline research and cooperation between multiple government departments is essential to providing better counseling services for young people.

"We need to respect teenagers first, understand what they are thinking and find out what is the best way to inform them," Chen said.

"To provide better counseling services for young people is a tough task for all countries in the world and I suggest the government set up a specialized department to deal with youth-related issues," Chen added.

The Ministry of Education issued new guidelines in 2008 that said primary and jun-ior-high schools across China should teach pupils about the human body, including secondary sexual characteristics.

Li, however, noted that due to long-time negligence in sex education, the courses are badly designed and totally incomplete, and only cover the biological aspect.

"One of the biggest problems is lack of human resources," he argued. "A practical solu-tion is to set up sex education majors in universities."

The APECY has set up a sex education base in Chengdu, Sichuan Province, to facilitate teacher training. The model is quite successful and the project is transplanting it to other cities nationwide, he explained.

For the past 10 years, condoms have been available in universities but only in un-noticed corners of the campus such as the dark stairs of the university hospitals.

Zuo Xuan contributed to this story.