Northeastern Illinois University Advocacy and Activism Peer Revision a revision of my research paper about sex education in china and grammar mistake corre

Northeastern Illinois University Advocacy and Activism Peer Revision a revision of my research paper about sex education in china and grammar mistake corrections Comm 3409
05/27/2019
The Future of China Sex Education Advocacy
Intro
An interesting interview published on September 2017 examined public attitudes toward
China sex education. The interview started with a novel question by asking whether participants
had asked their parents where they came from. The majority of people said yes, but that they had
been told they were from trash bins or oxter. None of the parents replied the question
straightforwardly with a correct answer. It resonated with me since, according to my mom, I also
was born in a trash bin. The comic answers show how far parents are willing to go to avoid
discussing sex. The social phenomenon forced me to keep thinking why it happens and why sex
is a taboo. Until finish watching the interview, I thought I found out the answer. The next
question asked people to express personal thoughts toward China sex education. Nine out of ten
participants answered without hesitation that current China sex education was completely not
enough at all. The strong and consist answer let me start to question the China sex education
system. One of the interviewees said that because of the lack sex education, that’s why so many
kids, primary schools kids, were doing incredible things and wrong ways to harm their bodies.
“Even though Chinese adolescent in sexual behavior was lower than Western cultures, their
attitudes toward sexuality had become opener and liberal.” (King, Li, and Winter, 2009, P. 470).
Sex should not be an evasive topic in China anymore. Based on the differences of children
sexual attitudes, the system of China sex education should also be improved. In this paper, I will
first illustrate the current state of Chinese sex education, then move to the ineffective attempts
China current have, and finally propose a future China sex education by learning from other
models. General speaking, I will argue a better, opener, and comprehensive model of future
China sex education.
Body
Part I: Current state of China sex education
“The need for sexuality education is recognized in the global 2030 Sustainable
Development Agenda.” (United Nations, 2015.), which includes goals for health and well-being,
quality education and gender equality. The purposes of those goals are to ensure sexual and
reproductive health and rights for everybody around the world. Over the past four decades, China
has issued various laws and policies related to school-based sex education. “Those policies
hugely included on school hygiene and health care, health education, moral education, safety
education, HIV and AIDs prevention education, and preventing child sexual abuse.” (UNFPA
and UNESCO, Implementation of Sexuality Education in Middle Schools in China, P. 09.) In
Article 13 of the Law on Population and Family Planning argues that schools should feature
course content to educate students on health, puberty, and sex health. In 2008, China published
new guidelines for health education in primary and secondary schools. “The guidelines seek to
integrate healthy behavior and lifestyles, disease prevention, psychological health, physical
growth and adolescent health care, methods to address dangers and ensure safety into targeting
schools.” (UNESCO and UNFPA, “Implementation of sexuality education”, P. 64.). After the
new guidelines were published, plenty of provinces and schools in China had several practices
about sex education. For instance, Jing’an District of Shanghai set up different levels of sex
education among primary schools, middle schools and high schools. Meanwhile, Yunnan
province also provided simple ‘education about living, survival and life’, which included only
some sex education to their students. (Cui, 2010.) Beijing used a special strategy by using an
‘integrative approach’ to combine sex education with psychology, biology and moral education,
integrating school lectures, activities, and counselling meetings. (Zhang, 2012.) Later in 2011,
the National Working Committee on Children and Women (NWCCW) in China called for the
strengthening development of reproductive health services for children. Gender equality
education was also promoted as an essential component involved in sex education. As of 2013, a
new policy named Opinions on the Prevention of sexual assault of Adolescents and Children
came out issued by Ministry of Education. The main purpose of the law was to prevent sexual
assault. “It indicated that the education departments should offer various formats to develop
education about sex assault prevention and increase public awareness toward the crimes.”
(UNESCO and UNFPA, “Implementation of sexuality education,” P. 65.) Most recently, in 2016
the X agency passed the Guidelines for the Prevention of Bullying and Violence among Primary
and Secondary School Students to prevent school bullying and violence. The guidelines was
component with three sections: how to prevent, how to address the issue and how to foster
integrity for prevention.
Besides several new policies published toward sex education from past years, some
programs were also implemented. In 2007, Beijing Normal University launched a program
targeting primary schools for migrant children. It developed a full class curriculum of student
books named Treasuring Life. The books had 6 units in total with appropriate content of families
and friends, life and skills, gender and rights, the human body and development, sexual health
and behavior, and sexual and reproductive health. As of 2017, over 15,000 students had
benefited from the program. Participants had significant improvements in sexuality skills and
greater awareness of sex-related behaviors. (Liu and Su, 2014.) Another program also created by
Beijing Normal University used 12 units, including: body image, gender, emotions and sex,
double standards for different genders, sexual diversity, communication and decision-making
skills and sexual reproductive health, unintended pregnancy and prevention to educate high
schools students. “The results of this project found out gender equality worked more effective to
advocate a comprehensive sex education than tradition health care.” (Sa and Wang, 2013.) In
addition, the project played an important key reducing discrimination by adolescents against
HIV/AIDs people and female victims of sexual harassment as well. In 2015, another significant
program was hosted by The China Family Planning Association (CFPA) aimed to improve
adolescents sexual and reproductive health. The organization had two major projects named
‘Way of Growth’ and ‘Connection’. Each of them targeted different groups. ‘Way of Growth’
focused on adolescents directly while ‘Connection’ targeted their parents. The aim of the
program was to increase parents-children sexual communication. As for now, the projects still
implemente by this association in 31 provinces. However, the effectiveness was not as efficient
as previous programs due to several reasons, like parents’ busy work, conservative thinking
patterns and so on.
In short, China has various policies and laws published over the past several years to
improve sex education in its schools. Each of these policies target different fields of sex
education: healthy lifestyles, gender equality, sex abuse prevention, bullying and violence. For
campaigns, even though they worked successfully when they were progressing, most of them
were not continuing right now. It is hard to tell the long-term benefits from them. Those
mentioned policies and campaigns are far from enough to provide a comprehensive sex
education. Even though China has improved sex education a lot, it still exists many concerns to
solve the issue. In the next part of the body, I will argue how those current attempts are not
effective to fix the situation.
Part II: The ineffectiveness of current attempts toward Chinese sex education
Numerous policies and campaigns carried out in China to try to change sex education by
targeting school-based method. However, plenty of them are uncomprehensive.
First ineffectiveness of current attempts is uncomprehensive targeting audiences.
Majority programs examine the importance of schools-based sex education, but parents also play
a key role to influence children’s sexual behaviors. An empirical study conducted in 2011 aimed
to consider Chinese parents’ perspectives on sexual education for adolescents. The researchers
found out the majority of parent participants believed they should be the first-hand sources of sex
education to their children. Nonetheless, only a minority of families did it successfully: “The
results of the study also showed lack family attentions of sex education might lead children to
use misinformed sexuality channels such as pornographic videos, cartoons, or novels.” (Liu,
Russell, and Van, “Chinese parents’ perspectives,” P. 230.) Connecting withIn an interview
hosted by China Global Television Network, three interviewers, who worked on child sex
education field, all agreed that Chinese sex education was lacking parental communication
currently. It caused their children to learn inappropriate knowledge from unsuitable channels.
(CGTN, interview) Additionally, the researchers summed up positive correlation between
parents’ reproductive and sexual knowledge and family sexual education. Namely, parents’
sexual knowledge would influence their attitudes toward children sexual education. Income was
another significant factor to influence parents’ sex attitudes. “High-income parents were more
willing to educate kids about sexuality and had more favorable sexual attitudes.” (Liu, Russell,
Van, “Chines parents’ perspectives,” P. 232.) Moreover, most people believed mother should
take the responsibility about parental involvements to educate and communicate with their kids.
However, paternal engagement also impacted it a lot. “A study demonstrated an association lowquality paternal engagement with daughters’ having poorer sexual development, promiscuity and
sexual risk taking.” (Delpriore and Hill, “The effects of paternal disengagement”, P. 234.) The
researchers concluded that paternal disengagement increased women’s sexual thoughts and
permissiveness. Fathers played a major role on influencing their daughters in attitudes and
behaviors of sex. Relating to Liu’s research (2011), lacking family sexual education was a
common phenomenon in China. Either mothers or fathers valued highly in a family sex
education. Those studies pointed out the imperfections of Chinese sex education. Most of
campaigns or policies targeted schools and kids themselves, however, parents, who should be
primary sources, were not involved.
The second disadvantage of China current sex education is not comprehensive sexual
orientations. Namely, the theory of intersectionality, which means multiples identities intersect in
ways that create a whole, did not support well in China. Many of social justice problem like
sexism and racism were overlapping and creating difficulty toward minority community.
(Crashaw) For instance, the system exists a bug excluding LGBTQ community. A paper done by
Kwok (2018) drew interviews from local Chinese teachers and LGBQ community members to
discuss the sex education about sexual prejudice against the minority community. It examined
how current social prejudices in China were large obstacles to LGBQ students learn sexuality
knowledge in schools. Moreover, China did not have any prejudice reduction regulations to help
teachers work with LGBTQ students. Neither students, nor teachers had a direction to learn. The
sexual discrimination was prevalent in China. It’s obvious that each of them was a member of
our society, but they were excluded from social participations. LGBQT community were
standing on the marginalizing place because of the old-fashioned social assumptions in China.
The incorrect assumptions were also an important factor ignored by current sex education.
Except LGBTQ community, boys were another ignored community. One research done in 2017
studied the lack sexual exploitation of boys in their health care and social support needs. The
authors concluded several key challenges encountering to stop their study. Lacking a consistent
definition of child sexual exploitation, difficulty in differentiating sexual exploitation, limiting
epidemiological studies in sexual exploitation prevalence all caused their study difficult to
progress. Most people forgot to tell boys how to protect themselves. The social assumptions also
influenced a lot here by framing boys as lower-risk community. On the other hand, the
homosexuality health also had been neglected by China. Detels and Luo conducted a study to
examine barriers to expanding HIV testing among men having sex with men (MSM) in China.
(2019) In the results, the researchers concluded participants felt fear of disclosing personal
information. Also, they lacked professional HIV knowledge and risk perceptions. The social
norms of HIV stigma and discrimination make people scared. The low level of HIV knowledge
and no affiliation to men having sex with men-oriented community both significantly associated
with the lower rates for participants to receive an HIV test. The study disclosed social
assumptions played a key role here to affect social activities toward them and also participants’
behaviors. As the authors suggested in the end, MSM communities should cooperate with
government, health organization, schools to reinforce HIV health education. The current China
sex education has the huge issue of excluding the minority community. However, each person
owns the same right to pursue their love regardless sex orientations. China should start to current
the social norms, think about all communities and process to design future sex education more
humanized and diverse.
The last one of China sex education insufficiency is the shortage of trainings. When
people think about sex education, medical staffs may would be the first authority they would like
to ask. In Hong Kong, Health and Medicine Week published a study examining 500 nurses about
their professional knowledge and attitudes about sex education in 2016. The results showed
majority of participants were highly aware of the importance of sexuality education. However,
most of them rarely felt knowledgeable and comfortable to communicate sex with adolescents. A
positive association was found out between comfort levels and practice frequency. Namely
speaking, those participants felt uncomfortable to discuss the topic because they did not have a
change to practice frequently. Lack of practicing or training played a significant role on
providing appropriate sex education. Medical staffs are at a greater chance to provide sex
education directly with schools and parents. Therefore, providing them enough trainings and
practices is a very important step to take to improve the whole sex education system. The next
step of training might focus on school-based. A sensitive “nerve” is required as a teacher to work
with kids. Majority teachers need to attain certain amounts of knowledge of, attitudes about and
training related to child sex issue like child sexual abuse (CSA). Liu, Chen and Zhang aimed to
examine whether preschool teachers had those abilities in Beijing. 245 participants from
different schools were administered and took questionnaires. “Less than 4% of participants
believed there was no obvious signs when CSA occurred, and less than 5% of the teachers ever
attended CSA prevention training programs. None of participant provided correct responses to
all CSA knowledge subscale questions.” (Liu, Chen and Zhang, “Preventing Chid Sexual Abuse,”
P. 5.) According to the results, the shortage of sex knowledge is prevalent in Beijing. Teachers
have weak consciousness toward child sex abuse problems. Also, they are lacking ability to
discover the issue. Moreover, the results argued attending training was a significant factor
influencing teachers’ sexual knowledge and attitudes. The lack sufficient preparation might
affect teachers’ roles on child protection, which may also limit their capability to teach an
accurate CSA knowledge. Another study done in Taiwan among kindergarten teachers reported
11% of 598 participants failed to report a suspected case of child abuse. Professional
responsibility of perceiving behavioral control played a key role on determining teachers’
intentions. (Feng, Huang, Wang. “Child Abuse & Neglect,” P. 127.) Combining those two
studies, lack of standardized training and clear reporting guidelines are both insufficiencies of
current China sex education. If teachers from the foremost of Chinese cities do not get
professional training, it is likely that the rest of cities are in worse conditions.
A previous survey done by Chinese nations examined “over half (53.5%) felt it was
acceptable for both males and females to have premarital sex and the lowest age was only 12.”
(Zhen and Chen, 2010.) The same as King’s study, both results showed Chinese adolescents had
a rather liberal attitude toward sex. The change of sex attitudes in China indicates the importance
of comprehensive sex education is a significant and fundamental action to promote sex health
and prevent sexual abuse.
In conclusion, in my opinion, three main issues plague current sex education in China:
uncomprehensive targeting audiences, uncomprehensive sexual orientation and lack trainings.
Each of them influences the effectiveness of China sex education quality. In the next part of my
article, I will argue how China can be improved by learning from other models.
Part III: The future of China sex education: Learning from other models
Since the last part I mentioned about certain insufficiencies of current China sex
education, I will advocate several solutions which can benefit China to deal with those problems.
First, in order to assemble all targeting audiences, China should come up with an idea to
let parents, kids and teachers work together. For instance, United States designed a study
examining 706 students at 11 middle schools to test whether family homework of a
comprehensive sex education help delay sexual initiation for adolescents or not. The program
lasted 3 years and delivered with 9 lessons per year for 6th, 7th, and 8th grades. 8 homework
assignments included to increase the parental communication about sex. The assignment topics
prompted students to roleplay different situations and parents, to switch roles with their children.
In effect,, the assignment made discussions about healthy and unhealthy relationships easier.
Students interviewed their parents about what it was like to be a teen, made lists for how to
abstain from having sex, and discussed the consequences of their personal decisions in class.
(Grossman, Frye and Charmaraman, “Family Homework,” P. 814.) The results of the study
proved that parental participations in assignments correlated with lower rates of vaginal
intercourse before the age of?. Also, family engagements with sexuality homework increased
family communication about sexual issues which could also delay the early sexual behaviors.
The purpose of the study successfully examined an effect method to improve family sexual
education. Family assignments worked effectively to improve home-based sexual education in
the United State as well as school-based sex education programs. Another similar program
launched in Uganda aimed to examine several schools-based interventions, whether it increased
parent-students sexual communication or not. The research methods were using classroom
lectures, assignments, and parenting workshops to motivate parental engagements. The
researchers concluded in the end that both students and parents significantly increased
communicate sexuality issues frequency and quality. It argued schools and parents should…
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