From Stewardship Report
Saigon, Vietnam. Don’t expect to see teachers demonstrating condom use with bananas or cucumbers during a sex education class in Vietnam. Teachers avoid the subject of sexuality as much as possible, eschewing the practical for the minimal. If students get any instruction on the topic at all, it’s usually folded into a brief biology lesson about puberty or HIV.
Phan Thi Hoai Yen guides students at a Vietnamese high school on how to use a condom. Courtesy: AIESEC.
But a group of young people are trying to do what high school teachers are too shy to do: Teach students what they need to know about sex.
A local chapter of AIESEC , a global student organization, has been visiting high schools to deliver a crash course on sex. The members, who are college students, warn their audience about the dangers of sexually transmitted diseases and demonstrate how to use condoms, cucumber and all.
“At some high schools, the students are very active,” AIESEC’s Nguyen Thi Thuy Linh said. “They raise their hand and talk, and go on stage to put the condom on the cucumber in front of everyone.”
Sex has long been a taboo topic in Vietnam. But developments in recent years have made the consequences of unprotected sex more apparent. Vietnam is among the countries with the highest abortion rates, according to the Guttmacher Institute, which works with the United Nations to research reproductive health. The rate has risen especially since the turn of the century, after ultrasound technology made gender-selective abortions possible.
In addition, an increasing number of young people are migrating to the cities for work or university. Away from their families, the migrants live in single or shared rentals that make it easier to have premarital sex.
The newspaper Tien Phong (“Pioneer”) reported in September that, although Vietnamese are getting married later, the age they begin to have sex has decreased 1.5 years since 2008.
Between 2007 and 2012, the percentage of adolescent abortions compared with total abortions more than doubled at Tu Do, the top maternity hospital in Ho Chi Minh City, according to Tien Phong. What’s more, 55.8 percent of people living with HIV are between 20 and 29 years old.
Read the full article from the Stewardship Report.
