REUTERS
Teachers display a card with an illustration depicting a girl going through a medical checkup by a doctor, as they describe preventive measures to avoid when sexual harassment occurs, during a class in Shadabad Girls Elementary School in Pir Mashaikh village in Johi, some 325 km (202 miles) from Karachi. PHOTO/Reuters
JOHI: In neat rows, the girls in white headscarves listened carefully as the teacher described the changes in their bodies. When the teacher asked what they should do if a stranger touched them, the class erupted.
“Scream!” one called out. “Bite!” another suggested. “Scratch really hard with your nails!” a third said.
Sex education is common in Western schools but these ground-breaking lessons are taking place in Pakistan.
Publicly talking about sex in Pakistan is taboo and can even be a death sentence.
Almost nowhere in Pakistan offers any kind of organised sex education. In some places it has been banned.
But teachers operating in the village of Johi in poverty-stricken Sindh province say most families there support their sex education project.
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Some of Pakistan’s most prominent schools, including the prestigious Beaconhouse School System, have been considering the type of sex education practised in Johi.
“Girls feel shy to talk to their parents about sex,” said Roohi Haq, director of studies at Beaconhouse.
There is definitely demand. Lahore-based Arshad Javed has written three books on sex education and said he sells about 7,000 per year. None are sold to schools.
But not everyone agrees with the lessons, partly because young people were not supposed to have sex before adulthood. Recently the government forced a private school to remove all sex education from its curriculum.
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In neighbouring India, many government schools formally offer sex education but Pakistani government schools have no such plans. Nisar Ahmed Khuhro, the education minister for Sindh province, was shocked to hear of the lessons.
“Sex education for girls? How can they do that? That is not part of our curriculum, whether public or private,” he said.
But Tahir Ashrafi, who heads an alliance of moderate clerics called the Pakistan Ulema Council, said such lessons were permissible under Islamic law as long as they were segregated and confined to theory.
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