Rise in Japan teen sex ignites education debate
Reuters: TOKYO: Sixteen-year-old Monami Okubo sees nothing wrong with sex before marriage.
“I really don’t think there’s any reason to wait,” said the bespectacled first-year high school teen, wearing her school uniform as she chatted with friends in Tokyo’s trendy Shibuya district. “It’s not realistic.”
Attitudes like Okubo’s are troubling for Japanese policy makers alarmed by a leap in teenage sexual activity.
Nearly half of all 17-year-old girls have had sex, up from around 17 percent in 1990. For boys, the figure is 40 percent, nearly double the 1990 figure, according to Health Ministry data.
A resulting jump in sexually transmitted diseases among young people and rising teenage abortion rates have touched off debate about sex education in a nation where pornography is widely sold but taboos about frank discussions of sex linger.
The debate pits those urging more detailed sex education against those who say schools are already far too explicit and some who want to promote U.S.-style abstinence-only education.
Ruling party lawmaker Eriko Yamatani says explicit sex education is partly to blame for the rise in teen activity.
“This is teaching kids from primary school that as long as you use contraception it’s OK to have sex,” she told Reuters.
Yamatani, 54, supports some sex education in schools but worries that some of the methods used — such as anatomically correct nearly life-sized male and female dolls and textbooks with illustrations of people having sex — are too graphic.
Girls, she said, should be learning that they “can become mothers and their bodies are sacred, their bodies aren’t theirs alone. They are very sacred things that give birth to new life.
“So, as a result, it’s desirable to have abstinence until marriage,” she added. “This message has to be thoroughly taught.”
Sex education is part of basic health curricula in most primary schools, while middle and high school students get sketchy information about contraception. More
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