A school teacher teaches Grade 1 students about their sexual organs. (Photo/Courtesy of Han Xuemei)
As the sex education offered in private schools for the children of migrant workers often fails to prepare them for adulthood, an NGO project designed to help these students has tried to provide them with comprehensive courses. But due to their limited resources, parental and official resistance and cultural conservatism, their scope is still limited.
China's remarkable economic growth over the last few decades would have been impossible without the hundreds of millions of rural laborers that packed up and headed to cities for work. While most of their children have remained back in their villages, usually being raised by their grandparents, many other have made the journey toward urban life with their parents.
But still, due to major cities' strict household registration rules, these children are marginalized in many ways, including being rejected by public schools and missing out on any kind of formal sex education. Just like their left-behind counterparts, many later suffer the effects of unsafe sex and harassment.
Some NGOs have started to intervene. In 2015, the New Citizen Program, a Beijing-based NGO dedicated to providing fair, quality and appropriate education for the children of migrant workers, launched the XX XY School project to provide sex education in Beijing.
"There is no denying that the scarcity of proper sex education in China's primary and middle schools, especially migrant schools, has become an important social issue and triggered many social problems. In this regard, we need to make enormous efforts to run sex-ed courses for adolescents, in an effort to help them form a systematic understanding of sex and enjoy a happy and comfortable life," said Han Xuemei, 38, who is in charge of the project.
The Beijing Statistical Yearbook estimates that there were 687,000 migrant children in the city under 14 years old by the end of 2015. Among these children, about two thirds are in education, including 80,000 studying in over 100 privately-owned "migrant schools."
"China's central government as well as local educational administrators stress the significance of sex education. But the reality is that most schools are struggling to run quality sex-ed courses for students. This is especially true in migrant schools where qualified teachers and teaching facilities are extremely rare," Han told the Global Times.
Because migrant workers often work long hours, they usually have little time to spend with their children, and because they often lack knowledge about sex themselves they find it hard to teach their kids about the topic, Han explained.
"Most migrant parents received little or no sex education when they were young. At that time, Chinese society considered the pursuit of sexual activities to be immoral. These parents feel confused and embarrassed about discussing sex," she noted.
Efforts and progress
Han claims that most migrant schools offer no sex education to students. Even though a few school authorities hold some lectures related to sex, for example, lectures on adolescent health and protecting oneself from sexual harassment, students rarely if ever receive sex education in a comprehensive and systematic way.
But what makes the XX XY School project distinctive is that migrant schools which work with it will run dedicated sex-ed classes with specialized sex-ed textbooks and teaching staff.
"We have cooperated with some primary schools for migrant children in Beijing on sex-ed courses for them. The pupils take six sex-ed classes every semester from Grade 1 to 6. Our textbooks are designed on the basis of the International Technical Guidance on Sexuality Education proposed by UNESCO," Han said.
In 2015, the XX XY School project, in collaboration with SEXUALITY, a child sex education research group based at Beijing Normal University, provided 9,405 migrant children with 1,344 sex-education classes in 13 migrant schools. A total of 147 professional teachers and nine qualified voluntary teachers have been involved in this project, its official website revealed.
