Ronald Reilliu,
Adrian Santaniau
3 Krygina Street Vladivostok,
690065 Russia
Last updated: October 12, 2010
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In addition to popped collars, pollution-spewing cars and over-sized malls, it appears China is now importing an equally unpleasant aspect of American culture, abstinence-only education.
Schools in Yunnan Province have begun to train teachers in sex education using a curriculum designed by the fundamentalist Christian group Focus on the Family.
The program promotes abstinence from sex before marriage as the only way for teens to avoid pregnancy and sexually-transmitted diseases, or STDs. The program also casts doubt on the efficacy of condom use in an attempt to frighten youth into abstinence.
China needs effective sex education.
The past few decades since the advent of reform have brought about a dramatic shift in Chinese culture as it has undergone a transformation from a closed society, and nowhere is this more apparent than in China's changing attitudes toward sex.
According to research by Li Yinhe, a Chinese sex expert, 60 to 70 percent of Chinese reported having premarital sex, which is up from 15 percent in 1989. Also, Chinese young people are losing their virginity at a younger age.
The most recently reported average age is around 22, though the figure could be actually lower given the high potential for reactivity, the sociological term for inaccurate self-reporting, among respondents due to Chinese cultural taboos.
The worldwide average is 17. Furthermore, state media reported a few years ago that during a one-week school holiday high school girls accounted for 80 percent of the patients at a Shanghai abortion clinic.
China can draw on the experience of the debate on sex education that has raged in the US over the past two decades and will not have to suffer through the results of the misguided policy being offered by groups such as Focus on the Family.
China has at its disposal a mountain of policy research conducted by social scientists showing such programs to be ineffective at best and harmful at worst. Federally-funded abstinence-based education programs have been in place since the early 1990s in the US.
Index of articles, click here.
Ronald Reilliu,
Adrian Santaniau
3 Krygina Street Vladivostok,
690065 Russia
Last updated: October 12, 2010