Moving India from Shhhhhh to comprehensive sexual education

“It is no better if your son rapes a woman than when your daughter gets raped. It is equally painful, may be more.

Rudransh Kashyap

In a country that is the second most populated in the world with approximately 2 billion people, the word Sex is still a taboo. In India, the topics associated with Sex is still not discussed openly and is often treated with hushed silences. It becomes extremely important for a country like India, which also has the highest youth population to make comprehensive sexual education a necessary topic to discuss upon. The lack of sexual education among the masses is reflected in widely in the social sect of the country. Sex education is not only necessary to create a general awareness about a bodily and reproductive process, it also answers and brings out issues related to sex and sexual health that are not discussed openly.
Sex Education debunks the presence of binaries and focuses on creating awareness about one’s body, identity and relationships. According to the WHO, sexual health is regarded as a state of physical, emotional, mental, and social well-being in relation to sexuality and not just the lack of disease or infirmity. Apart from this normalizing sex education at school level helps the adolescents to understand the bodily changes and creates awareness about a variety of issues related to one’s sexual health. Though sex education is slowly getting normalized in Tier 1 and Tier 2 cities across the country, there is a long way to go when it comes to rural areas and other small towns and cities. People are less aware of various sexually transmitted diseases that have a draining effect on the health of people. This is due to lack of adequate knowledge on how these diseases infect and how these can be prevented. An awareness about sex will subsequently create awareness about menstruation, safe sex, contraception and the cause and effect of sexually transmitted diseases amongst people. This will further allow a person to understand the notions of consent, privacy and knowledge about how to indulge in safe sexual activities instead of facing the repercussion of uninformed practices.
National Education Policy, 2016, which accepts the significance of sex education in schools for adolescent for safety measures. The Government had also introduced the Adolescent Education Program that would impart sex education in schools but this program was soon scrapped off due to protests on grounds of immorality. However, it is high time that sex education is normalized in India and is discussed out in the open instead of closed doors.