The relevance of Sex education is greater at this point in time than ever. Especially, with the emergence of the Internet, even younger section of the population is openly exposed to pornographic sites creating negative perception of sex in their mind. This adversely affects the mental state of the child. Access to the Internet is so easy at modern times that you can’t really stop them from visiting this kind of website.
In this scenario, the most effective way to create awareness in minds of the children is by teaching them about sex, reproductive health, etc. Having sex education in the curriculum allows children to make distinct differences between what s/he see on the porn and the actual reality.
Pornography is an industry aimed to manipulate the minds of an individual showing fantasy stuff. Most of the things we see there are far from reality. The lack of distinction between sex and porn would later create an expectation in one’s mind which would affect the individual later.
In Nepal, we do have the provision of reproductive health education but the education we get there is very limited. Reproduction and Sex are two different things. People not only get involved in sexual activities just for the sake of reproduction. In some of the rural areas, teachers often skip teaching this chapter altogether out of hesitation. This is the ground reality of Nepal and little effort is being made to change this.
Also, our perception of sex is very limited. We learn about sex between opposite genders i.e. male and female but we have no idea about the LGBTQ+ community and ‘sex’ as a topic from their perspective. Getting this kind of limited education has led us to a very narrow scope of mind.
In our society, talking about sex is still considered taboo. We often think things in terms of ‘dichotomy’ i.e either true or false and there is never a healthy discussion on this kind of topic.
We can see there is clear hatred towards LGBTQ+ community as societal standard allows us to see gender only in terms of ‘male’ and ‘female’. An effort need to be made to break the social stereotypes and we need to accept things rather than expecting things.
Especially rural parts of our country are sexually oppressed societies. I myself have experienced how they objectify the woman in terms of sexual appliances. There is a clear lack of sex education in the rural parts of our country often leading to VAW(Violence against women).
The increasing number of rape cases in countries like Nepal and India has a direct relation to sexual awareness especially in rural parts of these countries. The proper bringing up of the children with proper awareness about sex and freedom of expression regarding these topics would substantially decrease the violence against women.