Is the situation in Pakistan similar?
Where are our children heading?
Tuesday, 07 December , 2004, 10:06
Class VI student Ragini, all of 11 years, wants to know what the fuss is all about. So do a couple of her peers from a neighbouring school who videographed themselves in a sex act and then sold the MMS for Rs 100 per person.
Ragini would have you know that a Class XII student in her South Delhi school is pregnant for the third time and many of her seniors have ‘had sex’. Discuss: Upbringing of a child is the responsibilty of the entire society
“What’s the big deal about it? The birds and the bees have always been around, haven’t they,” Ragini asks you, looking surprisingly dumbfounded over the media, the school managements and the parents going into an overdrive of outrage that two students could actually indulge in sex and film it on the mobile.
Come to think of it, hasn’t one child outrage led to another more heinous one over the years? Hasn’t urban India recorded at least a dozen cases a year in which sex, violence, aggression, drugs and even incest by young ones has prompted intense study at one time or another?
A survey conducted by the VIMHANS’ Child and Development Centre, covering 120 schools, states that 60 per cent of school students have had sexual experiences. And, that teens indulge in oral sex more often than adults.
The survey also reveals that children start experimenting with their bodies by age 15 and that in the 15-17 age group, only 39.3 per cent males and 59.7 per cent females feel that sex must wait till marriage. Read: Delhi students in porn video!
Experts find nothing unusual in these unsettling facts. “Teenage is a critical stage and teenagers are basically sensation seekers,” says Max Health Care and Sama Nursing Home Consultant Psychologist Arpita Anand.
“With their high energy levels, high sexual drive and easy access to the Internet, teenagers find means to channelise energies for thrills,” adds Dr Rajesh Sagar, Associate Professor, AIIMS, New Delhi.
Here’s another reality check through a conversation in a school bus carrying Upper KG children home from a renowned English medium school. Says one chubby six-year-old boy to his friend: “They kissed so hard that there was a red mark on her face.” The boy sitting next to them joins in: “What I want to know is does anyone know how to kiss like they do in Star Movies!”
Another girl in her teens got into a lesbian relationship after being inspired by FTV. Dr Ekta Soni, Psychiatrist, Apollo Hospital, who came across the case, says: “We live in a distorted world and these incidents should make us wake up to the fact that adolescent sex is rising and here to stay.”
Beset with a literally uncontrollable generation, the parents, school managers and social scientists have been playing a futile blame game in which there are no winners. Besides pointing fingers at each other, they also blame technology for the resident evil, not accepting the fact that access to much of it is allowed by moneyed and doting parents themselves.
Coming to the defence of technology and putting the problem in perspective, AIIMS Psychiatry Department head Dr Rajat Ray says: “Let’s face it. Much before the Internet, students used to circulate porn books, nude photos and articles among themselves. What used to happen in the ‘chaney ke khet’ a decade ago is being brought closer home by mobiles, internet and even automobiles.”
Dr Jitendra Nagpal, Senior Consultant Psychiatrist, VIMHANS Hospital, agrees: “Westernisation has changed the social ethos in India. Children today are born in a technology-savvy world.”
They also have an inordinately huge access to information. How one teaches toddlers has also changed as this BEd trainee found in a prestigious school of Delhi. Instead of telling the children what word is formed by each alphabet, they are asked to give their words for the alphabet.
One child when asked ‘S’ for and he promptly replied “scuba diving” and “snorkelling.” He also knew the difference between the two words and enlightened the teacher who was taken aback by the knowledge of the four-and-half-year old.
Added to the information comes access to technology, which at a critical stage in their lives, adolescents find makes their wildest dreams come true. In the absence of effective monitoring, the teenager easily crosses the line of distinction and uses it destructively.
…Contd.