India is one of the countries with highest numbers of HIV+ victims and realising this, imparting of sex education has become a necessity. Sex education should be given in a proper manner keeping in mind the age levels of the tender developing buds.

Students have many things going on their minds and their quest of curiosity they develop over a hundred misconceptions through many irrelevant sources. “I don’t say, tell us what is what, but at least tell us what is right or wrong. After realising that India is one of those countries with highest numbers of HIV+ victims, safe sex education is a prime necessity for the youth of the nation,” Shruti Kakan, a student of Montfort School Nagpur said.

The imparting of sex education has to take place in a proper manner keeping in mind the age levels and mental insights of these tender developing buds. Rev Bro Bala Showry, principal, Montfort School, Nagpur, considers sex education to be futile. According to him, “We can make them aware of things and time will take care of the rest.”

Meanwhile, Vandana Rao, a social studies teacher feels that the kind of maturity possessed by school students is something prior to which proper sex education is the need of the hour. She says, “I agree to this education but the way it should be given, the extent to which it should be given, must be properly dealt with before implementing it.”

Various reasons for the rising number of pregnancies are lack of sex education, subjection to pressures (social, financial, poor, peer etc), avoiding discussions in open, drugs and illicit substance misuse and dependence, exploring new avenues of life, grownups involving parents avoiding to provide formal information based sessions or they themselves being ignorant (commonly found in developing or underdeveloped countries). “I have seen and I am at present teaching students from filthiest of conditions, ignorant of many things indulging themselves into many wrong things, they are not used to. They have to be searched and pulled from their homes to attend a single class at school where I teach,” says Pooja Kadasne a biology teacher in a Nagpur based government affiliated school.

Dr Ritesh Bhandarkar, a London based psychiatrist strongly feels that ignorance is not the sole reason, because he reasons out that if it could be so, and then the figures would have been evident only from developing and underdeveloped countries. On the contrary it is more popularly spread in Western world where teenagers who are well aware of sex education and having sex at their age is the norm in general.

“Both print and electronic media must create awareness about the importance of sex education and its effects on teenagers who actually underwent these personal ordeals. The effects of these should be explained under different headings like social, educational, financial, physical, emotional, mental, familial, etc,” he emphasised.

Books should not be the only medium of sex education and it should be systematically spread through advices by parents, teachers, doctors and nurses and society in general, he added. Unless and until sex education is made mandatory in schools, the giggles in the biology classes, where lessons on reproduction are taught, will continue.