Sex education: to be or not to be

People are generally ignorant of sex and prejudiced about sexual education. Hence, a survey of the knowledge of and the attitudes towards sex was conducted among college students in Bombay. Although the principals of the colleges initially objected to this survey, they could be persuaded to give permission for it.

Material and methods

The survey covered 1070 second year students of various faculties from thirteen colleges in Bombay. Each faculty was represented by one (in some cases two) colleges. The colleges were selected in such a way as to cover equally (a) urban Bombay and its suburbs and (b) the north and the south regions of Bombay, to compensate socio-economic and cultural differences in various groups.

Second year college students were given the proforma and asked to fill it within one hour. No names or roll numbers were required to be filled so as to conceal the identity of the students in order to get honest and true information. Most of the students finished filling the proforma in about 45 minutes. They were quite enthusiastic about it as was seen from the number of questions they asked as the end. The proforma consisted of two parts:

Part A was a multiple choice questionnaire to assess the knowledge about sex, and comprised questions on anatomy and physiology of reproduction and on venereal diseases. The knowledge of respondent was grouped (on the basis of the marks they obtained) into good (41-100 marks) and poor (0-40 marks).

Part B assessed attitudes to sex on a "Permissiveness Scale" 0-15. It consisted of four questions. Each question had five possible answers and the respondent had to tick the one he thought appropriate. The students who scored 0-10 in this part were considered "Conservative" (not permissive) and those who scored 11-15 were considered "Liberal" (permissive). Three per cent of the students were used to taking alcohol (10% of them used to take it frequently) and 9% were used to take other drugs addictives.

Results and discussion

All the 1070 students responded to part A of the questionnaire whereas only 1018 responded to part B. Statistical analysis of the data revealed no significant correlation between sex knowledge and caste, religion, economic and social background as well as student's attitude towards religion. It appears that in a cosmopolitan and crowded city of Bombay, these factors fail to affect the knowledge of sex.

Only 30.7% of students studied had good knowledge of sex; the rest 69.3% had poor knowledge. A higher proportion of the medical students had good knowledge of sex than students from other faculties; but even amongst medical students, 33% could be classified as having poor knowledge [Table 1].

When asked about the reasons for increase in promiscuity, the majority replied that it was because of (1) blind imitation of western culture, (2) the parents were too busy to give attention to and understand their children, and (3) women's lib and general emancipation.