KEYWORDS: sex education; taboo; youth; educators; counselors; populations; human sexuality.
Introduction:
Sex education essentially focuses on the physical, psychological, emotional, social and relational components of human relationships. There has always been a stigma attached to this subject in Indian society irrespective of the culture or religion one belongs to. In the present time weve seen increasing interest among teens and adolescents to break this stigma and gain knowledge about such sensitive topics. Unfortunately, its been observed that due to curiosity in their minds they prefer unethical ways to gain this knowledge which leads to incredibility in the process of learning about Family Life education. Hence, adolescent carries a bag of anxiety, confusion and apprehensions when it comes to sex education. These doubts can be scientifically cleared only by educational curriculum and parental guidance at the right time and age. Sex Education can definitely help students to develop positive perspectives and attitudes toward sex education. As much as introducing FLE in the curriculum has always been a need of an hour, an outreach was still experienced after the in
troduction of a new adolescent education program stressing on adolescent reproductive health by NACO and HRD Ministry, in 2007 leading to the banning of the sex education program. School administrators were threatened with dire consequences for corrupting their tender minds. Even after several protests and moral policing, stating that the program is unfit for students, AEP was adopted by a few public as well as private schools but they lacked in implementation of the same. No doubt the program covers a broad range of sensitive issues such as body image, violence and abuse, gender and sexuality, STIs, etc, one of the highly prioritized issues is the importance of consent and negotiation in intimate relationships, in todays India missed out by the concerned authorities. Such negligence on the Institutional as well as on the parental level is one of the reasons for the increasing statistics of rape cases in India. However, with the reference to Indian context parents are now open to communicating with their child about FLE but due to lack of guidelines on age-appropriate content that needs to be conveyed to the child they fail to enact their role in the childs development.