Sex education: a tangled Web

By Lydia Chen  |   2008-7-11  |     NEWSPAPER EDITION

MANY Shanghai students in the crucial 12-19 age range have a sex educator answering the most difficult and delicate questions 24 hours a day.

Unfortunately, the "teacher" is the Internet.

A survey, jointly organized by the Shanghai Center for Population and Family Planning Education and Communication and the 65876866 accidental-pregnancy hotline, questioned 1,508 students from the age of 12 to 19 in five middle schools in Pudong, Yangpu and Zhabei districts.

Junior-middle-school students made up 1,050 of those surveyed; the other 458 were in high school. About 86.9 percent of them regarded sex as "a normal biological and emotional need."

The survey was released on the eve of World Population Day today.

Sixty-eight percent of high-school boys and 46.58 percent of high-school girls said they learned about sex from Websites, compared with 29.71 percent for junior girls and 30.09 percent for junior boys.

About 79 percent of the boys and 87 percent of the girls said they hoped schools would provide more sex-education classes.

Nearly 23.4 percent of respondents said it was acceptable to look at erotica online, but 53.5 percent said they had never looked at anything erotic on the Internet.

Pornography made 5.44 percent feel nervous and confused but 4.73 percent said they felt excited by it.

The Internet was a communication platform, with 67 percent talking to the opposite sex online.

The survey found that 31 percent of parents of high-school boys turned a blind eye to their sons' relationships with the opposite sex. The corresponding figure for the parents of girls was 19 percent.

About 55 percent of respondents said they would approach sex responsibly but nearly 32 percent said they would not.

Nearly 27.4 percent admitted they knew nothing about contraception and almost 60 percent said they knew nothing or very little about the effects of pregnancy or abortion on a teenager.