Supposedly we, as human beings, who are currently living in a phase where we evolved to an adult, should understand the basic sex education, starting from what’s the meaning of sex, what’s the purpose of having sex and what are the possibilities that going to happen while and after we had sex, right?
For example India has the the best sex education programme in the world, even though at first, sex education was a such controversial topic by 2014. But eventually, they (YP Foundation) set up a progressive programme which teaches the teenagers about gender, sexual diversity and the other things.
Unlike India, Indonesia is lacking in sex education, the sex topic is still taboo in this country where the majority are Muslims. Many of people here when they heard the word Sex they are most likely to relate it to pornography. They still think that sex is just an act between two individual in order to release their lust when the truth is that sex is not just that and it is the basic thing that every human should understand.
It is necessary to give students sex education to get a clearer understanding about both their own bodies and sexuality in order to be able to avoid and protect themselves from sexual violence or harassment. Many of the people I interviewed admit that there are still a lot of things that they don’t understand. When I asked them some topics regarding the sex education like, how to use tampon, how does birth control works, what are the risks of having unprotected sex beside getting pregnant and infected by AIDS, some said that they only receive a limited explanation about sex education as it was a part of the biology subject at school.
“I only learned about human’s reproductive and sexual organs and how puberty works, that’s it.”
It was one of the responses that I got after asking what they learned in sex-Ed session that they had. As the primary source of knowledge, school should not be ‘shy’ in giving the student the bird and bees talk and parents should be open talking about sex with their children to at least give them heads up before letting them go to the world.
Family should be the first one we can ask deliberately about such topic where we are too shy to talk about it to other people beside our family. Indonesians are mostly only warned of the dangers of having sex (“Free-sex is not something you should do, it’s a sin“ a typical thing that most of Indonesian teenager being warned with), and never actually teach us why is it dangerous and how to avoid it.
Although there’s a difference in how sex-education are being delivered to students between the public and international school. In an international school, which applies the international-standard curriculum, gives their pupils the proper sex-ed and actually assigned it to be one of the subjects that the students must learn.
Meanwhile in public schools, they only provide a brief explanation about sex (mostly talking about puberty) and after that, the students only receive information about sex in biology class which only explains about the sexual (reproductive) organs and so on so on.
What this country needs is the willingness to talk about this topic without relating it to pornography, give them proper information which can be easily accessed by the public. Maybe Indonesia could try to learn from India by making a sex-education centre or simply put a Sex-Education in their curriculum.
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