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　　Sex education in China is caught between old taboos and cultural change 　　 　　On Christmas Day last year, Zeng Wen (not his real name), 13, broke into the home of a 25-year-old Beijing woman and tried to sexually assault her. He was stopped by security guards who heard the woman’s cry for help.
　　
　　Later at the police station, he begged for mercy, saying that he is still a schoolboy. “I’m sorry for what I’ve done to you, Miss,” he cried. “I hope you can forgive me and I’ll never do it again.”
　　Zeng told his father that he tried to assault the woman after watching pornographic videos in an Internet café. “I talked with his mother until late last night,” the father later said with a deep sigh. “We agreed that we should offer more care and guidance to him during his adolescence.”
　　Zeng is among the millions of young adults in China undergoing a period of dramatic physical and mental change. Dealing with the development of sexual characteristics and psychological changes while living in a country in an unprecedented state of flux, Chinese teenagers say they are immersed in a whirlpool of anxiety and want to learn more about the bewildering subject of sex.
　　But teaching them hasn’t been easy. Before the 1980s, sex was not an openly discussed subject in China, and young people had little access to a formal sex education.
　　People’s attitudes began to change with the economic boom and massive inflow of information after China adopted its reform and opening-up policy in 1978. Since then, adolescent sex education has found its way into classrooms as part of a government-sponsored health education program.
　　The first series of sex education textbooks rolled off the printing press in January 2002 amid public debate. Targeting students by age group in junior middle school, senior middle school and university, the textbooks cover wide-ranging topics such as adolescent sexual development, sexual psychology, sexual health and self-protection, sexual ethics, marital sex, contraception, sexual dysfunction and prevention of sexually transmitted diseases (STDs) including HIV/AIDS. With the textbooks made widely available to students, sex education has been institutionalized in Chinese schools.
　　
　　However, sex education is still a weak link in China’s education system. Given economic, social and cultural disparities in the country, education is uneven between different regions and between urban and rural areas.
　　For older and less-educated people, sex is often still a taboo subject for discussion. In recent years, with more and more people having premarital sex, STDs increasingly affecting younger people and the number of pregnant adolescent girls on the rise, the task of offering sex education to young adults has become an ever-more-challenging endeavor.
　　
　　Diverse information sources
　　
　　SEXUAL AWARENESS: Students read a textbook titled First Awakening to Love. Chinese schools are required to offer formal sex education, despite lingering sensitivity to the topic
　　According to Xu Yi, Secretary General of the Zhejiang Sexology Association, young people today have easy access to sexual images, but insufficient knowledge about sexuality, compared with their counterparts three decades ago.
　　` 　　They get information from a variety of sources, such as the Internet, pornographic videos and books, TV programs and cartoons. Xu said that about 80 percent of what middle school students know about sex comes from these sources.
　　Given this, Xu concluded that young people don’t lack knowledge about sexual physiology. However, he believes that these media representations can’t offer an accurate picture of sex, and are especially lacking in terms of sexual psychology and morality.
　　
　　“I’m just curious,” said Li Xiangpeng, a senior middle school student in Beijing. Near the Hilon Building, a digital product plaza in the hi-tech Zhongguancun district, Li bargained with a middle-aged woman for pornographic videos at 8 yuan per disk.
　　“Nothing serious,” he remarked casually. “Many of my classmates watch them. It’s no secret in our school, but this is the first time I’ve bought one.”
　　He said that apart from websites, classmates who watch pornographic videos are his greatest source for sex knowledge. “They all know a lot [about sexuality], and often talk about it at school,” Li said. “That’s why I’m tempted to have a try myself.”
　　Zhan Ming, Deputy Director of the Family Planning Commission of Hunan Province, said he is worried about this trend. “Vulgar, sexually explicit and even crime-inducing sexual information that is being spread to young people through various channels can adversely affect their physical and mental health at a crucial period of growth,” he warned.
　　Sex education experts point out that informal sources of information about sex often give young people wrong ideas, for example, on the transmission and treatment of STDs. Many young people who have accessed to pornographic videos and websites have only a haphazard knowledge of sexuality.
　　This ignorance has led to disastrous consequences, as evidenced by an increase in the number of underage pregnant girls. Statistics from Modern Women’s Hospital in Hefei, capital of Anhui Province, show that 40 percent of unexpectedly pregnant women were under the age of 18 in the first half of 2005, compared with 18 percent in October 2004.
　　Some of the girls treated by the hospital have had more than one abortion. One 16-year-old girl had four abortions in two years, according to the hospital.
　　
　　Parental dilemma
　　
　　LIFE LESSON: Students at a high school in Beijing discuss physical and mental changes during adolescence with their teacher
　　Many parents look to schools to provide sex education. However, according to a survey conducted by the Social Survey Institute of China in 2002, with over 3,000 people polled, nearly 90 percent of the students responded said they would first seek advice from parents on sex-related questions.
　　These students believe that families should be mainly responsible for sex education. As well, more than 70 percent of respondents to the survey said they have the right to sex education.
　　However, there is a long way to go before families become the base of sex education. According to a survey of 1,500 families in Beijing carried out by the Beijing Women’s Federation in 2002, 74 percent of the parents, among whom 70.2 percent are mothers, said they avoid talking about sex with their children.
　　Nearly 75 percent of the parents have not realized the need to give timely sex education to their children. When asked about sex by children, 50 percent said they would tell them that they will know about it when they grow up. Only 3 percent said they were willing to give them a detailed explanation.
　　“My parents taught me virtually nothing,” said 18-year-old Sun Bin, a third-year senior middle school student in Beijing. When his family first installed a telephone six years ago, he kept his own phone book. Looking through the book, his mother found several girls’ names. She warned him that he should concentrate on his studies instead of thinking about “irrelevant things.”
　　Sun complained that his mother rejected him even before he ventured to ask. However, as he grows up, he feels an increasing need to learn about sexuality.
　　“Now that the formal ways [of acquiring sex knowledge] are blocked, you have to resort to indecent means,” Sun said. He said pornographic videos have been the only resource for him to learn about sexuality over the years.
　　Professor Su Ping from the Renmin University of China said parents should abandon the following three presumptions with regard to sex education: sex can be self-taught, children are too young to know about sex and children needn’t be told about sex unless they ask.
　　Some mothers and fathers say they are unwilling to offer sex education because it should be taught at school. Their thinking goes, we are not sex education experts, and we don’t know how much knowledge is appropriate. Moreover, it is awkward and uncomfortable to talk about sex at home, parents say.
　　Shere Hite, a world-renowned sex expert, said in a lecture at Peking University Health Science Center last November that family members can sit together to talk about sex. For example, she said, when girls menstruate for the first time, it would be a good occasion to tell them about sex.
　　According to her, some parents in the United States habitually give their children a book to read when they ask about sex, assuming the book will tell them all about it. Hite doesn’t approve of this practice as she says it will end the dialogue between parents and children. When they encounter such questions again, they will not dare to ask their parents, a situation she believes will eventually lead to problems.
　　Hite called on parents to talk about sex with their children in an open and natural manner. Displays of intimacy in front of children, such as a kiss or a loving touch, can be a simple and direct way of sex education, providing the parents behave authentically, she added.
　　
　　Challenges for teachers
　　
　　“We do have health education at school, but it’s always neglected by the school,” said Li Xiangpeng, the student buying pornography at Zhongguancun.
　　“The teacher will ask us to learn by ourselves when it comes to contents on sexual psychology and physiology,” he said, adding that teachers of other subjects often seize the time for health education to make up for their lessons. “Also, there is a catch-22, as what is taught in health education isn’t new to us at all and the teacher tells us nothing that we want to know.”
　　According to a survey published by Beijing Youth Daily, half of junior middle school students in Beijing aren’t happy with the sex education at school, rejecting it to be “too conservative.” Also, 41.8 percent of junior middle school students believe sex education should be put on equal terms as Chinese and math.
　　At present, most schools in China aren’t able to offer up-to-standard sex education for various reasons. Limited to sexual physiology and anatomy, sex education in many schools falls far short of practical demands. In underdeveloped regions, sex education is still often unavailable in schools.
　　“The lack of qualified teachers is the biggest problem,” said Wei Haiyan, Director of the Moral Education Department at No.9 Middle School in Lanzhou, Gansu Province. “At present, the health education lessons are given by former doctors in the school hospital. Although they are experienced and give lively lectures, they have a long way to go to become specialized sex educators.”
　　According to Zhuang Yan, an expert in STD and HIV/AIDS prevention in Gansu Province, some teachers of sex education know almost nothing apart from sexual physiology. “There is a nationwide lack of qualified teachers. Unfortunately, efforts made to train these teachers have proven far from adequate.”
　　Liang Ping, Yunnan Bureau Chief for the Chinese Women’s Daily newspaper, took part in a sex education program in four primary schools in Yunnan Province at the end of 2003. “Like their counterparts in urban areas, rural students are also eager to learn about sexuality in class,” she said, noting that sex education can be an uphill battle for rural schools as the teachers sometimes find it embarrassing to talk openly about sex.
　　The program that Ling Ping participated in was met with significant resistance from the teachers, who insisted that primary schools are not obligated to offer sex education. They worried that they would be subjected to accusations from parents and even the whole community if they broke the taboo. One teacher had already been labeled a “porn teacher” for discussing sexuality in class.
　　Finally, some 20 teachers agreed to be the first group of trainees in the program. When the course came to the part where names of sexual organs had to be frequently mentioned, the teachers were almost petrified with embarrassment, despite the trainer’s efforts to create a comfortable atmosphere. A female teacher left training after the first lecture.
　　Recalling these awkward experiences, Liang said the mental barriers of teachers must be broken down before they can pass on sex knowledge to students.
　　Professor Chen Yiyun, an expert on women’s studies at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, said that sex education should begin before puberty.
　　For example, contents such as the origin and development of life and how the body works should be taught to primary school children so they can be prepared for the physical and mental changes that occur during adolescence.
　　With living standards in China improving, today’s youngsters tend to mature early, a trend that calls for the adjustment of sex education strategies.
　　Rui Xiaoling, a health education teacher at Lanzhou No. 9 Middle School, said, “Students in the same class can be in different stages of development. For some precocious students, this course is hardly useful.”

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