In Latin America there is a lack of adequate sex education

Two 14-year-old girls, students of the Jesuit and Maria college, a Catholic girls’ school in Buenos Aires, describe the sex lessons they witnessed. Last year they learned about fertility and the sexual organs. “It was really embarrassing!” Says one of them. This semester at school they talked about the birth process, but the students are not sure what else they will be taught. The teachers refused to answer some of the questions the classmates asked anonymously. “They said it wasn’t appropriate to talk about it at school and that we could ask our family for these things,” says the other.

Sex education is patchy across Latin America, one continent
predominantly Catholic. While all governments in the region have to provide the rudiments of sex education on paper, many schools do not.

A survey conducted in 2020 in Brazil found that only a quarter of teachers had undergone training aimed at classroom sex education. “We train according to our interests,” says Vicky Fernández Blanco, a preschool teacher in Argentina, who explains to her pupils how to ask for consent before hugging a friend, and things like that.

A generational problem
Some countries are doing better than others in this area. In Mexico, where the constitution stipulates secular education, some public school textbooks show, with simple illustrations, that boys can pull down their pants to learn about their sexual organs, while girls can use a mirror. In Argentina, in 2011, the ministry of education created a textbook to help parents tell their children about puberty, masturbation,
contraception and to explain that sexual abuse of minors is a crime.

But in much of the region, sex education is indistinguishable from a biology class. Although abstinence is rarely actively promoted, information on contraceptives may be outdated or limited to condoms. “They told us about interrupted coitus, which doesn’t seem like a good suggestion to me,” says Ariadna, a 15-year-old from an Argentine public school. Teachers often do not talk about abortion, and this is because, in some Latin American countries, abortion is illegal. Furthermore, the discourses on sex almost always concern the heterosexual sphere. “It would have been nice to hear about the LGBT + community,” says 18-year-old Brazilian Igor Farah.

Many parents, who grew up in the same system, are unable to fill in the gaps. Sometimes they don’t have the necessary knowledge, says Guadalupe, one
24-year-old woman who works with charities and gives sex education classes to young people in the Mexican state of Oaxaca. In her city, adults have long taught their sons and daughters that one can get pregnant while sitting on the toilet. Other parents are simply too modest and for this reason it is common to use euphemisms such as “palomita” (colombina) to indicate the vagina.

Many children are turning to the internet. But that complicates matters, according to Yuri Pitti, who works at Aplafa, a sexual health organization in Panama. “Before the struggle was for access to information, today it’s about accessing correct information,” he says. Young guys tend to have unrealistic expectations about sex, especially because they watch pornographic films.

Perhaps due to poor sex education, teen pregnancies are common in Latin America and the Caribbean, although the rate has dropped. About 18 per cent of births in the region are the result of mothers under the age of twenty. Only sub-Saharan Africa has worse numbers. Furthermore, covid-19 may have disrupted the improvements that were underway in this area. In 2020, the number of pregnant girls between the ages of 10 and 19 in Panama increased by 8 percent compared to 2019, probably due to confinement and school closures. Sexually transmitted diseases are also on the rise in some countries in the region.

Air of change
Some politicians are trying to change things. Gabriel Boric, the new 36-year-old Chilean president, wants to “introduce non-sexist education”. In other words, making teaching compulsory for boys and girls not only
sex education, but also sexual diversity and gender stereotypes. He wants schools to distribute condoms and for sex education to include topics like abortion, which could soon become legal in Chile.

In April, the government of Panama introduced a sex education law that requires children to learn how to avoid pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases, and how to get help in the event of abuse. The Morena party, ruling in Mexico, is also planning to include education
sexuality in its child rights legislation. This would mean that, on paper, teachers will have to talk about contraceptives and similar topics. Last year, the Cuban dictatorship announced it would update its 1970s “family code”. If this decision is approved by a referendum, lessons on sexuality will be included in the school curriculum.

In some states, sex education has gotten bogged down in culture wars. In Peru, legislation could be passed that allows parents, if they so wish, to prevent sexual education classes from taking place. Furthermore, if teachers fail to take parental concerns into account, they risk being fired. “Con mis hijos, no te metas” (leave my children alone) is a parents’ association founded in Peru in 2016. The group has spread throughout the region and has already obtained the dismissal of two education ministers in country. Furthermore, Esdras Medina, the deputy who proposed the law, is the same one who in the past blamed the floods caused by El Niño on the introduction of sex education in schools.

In 2006, the municipal government of Santiago, the capital of Chile, also tried to introduce a textbook for teenagers entitled “One Hundred Questions About Teenage Sexuality”, which included chapters on what the clitoris is, how long is the penis on average. , menstruation, LGBT + people and how to cultivate healthy relationships based on “mutual respect, communication and trust”. Conservatives objected, calling the book a sexual manual. Shortly after, a center-right politician won the municipal elections and withdrew him from circulation. The new mayor wrongly claimed that the book promoted anal sex as a method of avoiding pregnancy. Given the conservative climate, Boric’s plans could also suffer a similar backlash.

(Translation by Federico Ferrone)