Each time a child or adolescent asks a question that may be (even indirectly) related to sexuality, many parents and teachers get squirmy and nervous. This may be because they themselves do not have the information required, but in most cases, it has more to do with the ‘hush-hush’ that surrounds sexuality. After all, a child’s asking “How are clouds made?” does not evoke the same anxieties as “How are babies made?” We are taught shame at an early age, and we then transmit it on. This need not be the case, and in a fascinating interview with Shikha Aleya, Ketaki Chowkhani, author of The Limits of Sexuality Education, offers us the refreshing possibilities of the erotics of sexuality education and the fact that “the entire school curriculum and life itself is suffused with sexual meanings”.
Avoiding answering questions about sexuality means losing the opportunity not only to impart accurate information but also to create a space of trust and safety for young people. Antara Buzarbaruah makes a compelling case for the significance and relevance of comprehensive sexuality and personal safety education and why it is not ‘only’ for children, and how parents and teachers also need to be educated.
Parents often pass the buck to teachers but also offer resistance when teachers step up to the task as Ayesha Khaliq and Nandhini Jaishankar find. They tell us about the experiences and challenges that sexuality educators from different parts of India face while navigating conversations on sexuality with young people and the strategies they use to address changing and disparate needs.
Sexuality educators like everyone else need resources too. ElsaMarie D’Silva reviews Neha Bhat’s Unashamed – Notes from the Diary of a Sex Therapist and recommends it highly as a transformative work and as an essential tool for those seeking to educate, understand, and embrace the many facets of human sexuality
Sahana G, in a thoughtful piece, writes about her mother and her eight-year-old self, about how each of them grew up in a Bangalore that was transforming in different ways, about how “each generation pushes against the boundaries inherited from the last”, and, most of all, about the courage to ask and the courage to answer.
This time we have three fiction contributions, each of them also in some way about the courage to ask and the courage, or lack of it, to answer. They are placed under the category of fiction but are actual depictions of the varied realities that we currently live in. Two are about ‘the talk’ as it happens in school settings. Aradhana PS writes wryly about the annual sex ed workshop that a group of school kids attend as they go through grades 7, 8 and 9; what they are taught is far less than what they already know, none of their questions are answered, and, of course, there are no birds, no bees! But it can be quite different from this, and Taarina Therese Chandiramani’s story is a heartwarming illustration of what happens when “…she’s not here to shame them or lecture them. She’s here to give them words when they have none.” Drawing us into the landscape of a dream, Abishek Philip delicately uncovers the complex relationship between social conditioning, emotional vulnerability and intimacy. He writes of the weight of the “words I left unspoken when the moment called for honesty” and his decision to choose vulnerability over silence.
In Hindi we bring you a translation of Riya Parikh’s article on creating safe spaces for children to see things in a different light and of Simran Sanganeria’s article about the audacity of sexuality educators.
As we look to a new year, may we be blessed with the ability to hold space for questions about sexuality – those we are asked by children and adolescents and those we ask of ourselves.
