Sex Education for Kids

Finally, school kids are going to learn about sex. I had been ‘advocating’ sex education in school since the 1990s. I believed kids needed to know something about sex if they were going to be told about sex predators and how to keep away from potentially dangerous situations. I believed that education could reduce sex crimes committed on children and might also prevent the loss of some young lives.

However, people were not receptive to the idea. One shocked man even said: What? Teach students in the classroom what’s done behind locked doors?

How stupid could one get?

I thought kids should have a fair idea of the subject. They should know that babies don’t just arrive from nowhere in the middle of the night. (Better they learn the correct information from a responsible adult than pick weird stuff from other sources, don’t you think?) They should know the proper names for body parts. It is imperative they learnt what is accepted touching and what is immoral behaviour. They should learn how to avoid suspicious people and know who to go to for help.

For various reasons, many parents don’t teach their kids the proper words for sex organs but instead give them non-sexual names. People outside the family could be forgiven if they wondered why all the fuss when little Johnny complained some fellow touched his golf set—you know, two balls, a bag and a stick. With a proper vocabulary, no extra explanation is needed.

That reminds me of the Dusun parents of the good old days. They were never squeamish about teaching their kids names of body parts. In my parents’ house, balabak and tontolou (testis), tolih (penis) and totoh (vagina) were everyday words like eye or grass. In fact, I had always thought that the common boy’s name ‘Ontolu’ came from ‘tontolu’ the Dusun word for egg. And you can guess the origin of ‘Otoh’, the common pet name for girls! Incidentally, these were never derogatory terms. The Dusuns didn’t have four-letter words—those had to be borrowed from other cultures by the ‘modern’ Dusun.

Now let’s skip back to our main subject…

The problem is/was when we talk about teaching students sex education, people get hot under the collar because they assume that you’re teaching kids how to make babies, coital positions included!

Narrow-minded nincompoops.

Had these people listened to our voices a dozen years ago maybe, just maybe, many innocent kids could have been saved from sex predators.

Now it is okay to teach sex education in schools. It took the rising number of teenage pregnancies and countless newborns left in toilets and abandoned in dumpsters to make Malaysia think that sex education should be in the curriculum after all.

 I have a feeling that if trashing babies has not become a problem, there’d be no sex education for our young. What do you think?

Pictures from Google Images