Sex! Don't be alarmed it's just the "S" word. Through­out Trinidad and To­ba­go the top­ic of sex and pro­mot­ing prop­er sex ed­u­ca­tion in schools has been treat­ed poor­ly, when com­pared to more de­vel­oped coun­tries. A sur­pris­ing­ly large num­ber of sec­ondary school (as well as pri­ma­ry school chil­dren) are com­ing across the "S" word in­ap­pro­pri­ate­ly and in­for­mal­ly. In a sur­vey of a form three class at a co-ed sec­ondary school, nine out of every 10 chil­dren had "learnt" about sex from their peers. (In case you were won­der­ing, they don't think ba­bies come from stalks). How­ev­er, leav­ing teenagers and even some younger than that, to learn about this top­ic from one an­oth­er may have sev­er­al con­se­quences.

One ma­jor re­sult of such ac­tions is teenage preg­nan­cy. Trinidad and To­ba­go faces over 2000 teenage births an­nu­al­ly. Pamela Kohler, Lead Re­searcher at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Wash­ing­ton, in her stud­ies on the ef­fec­tive­ness of sex ed­u­ca­tion in schools, sug­gest­ed that wide-rang­ing sex ed­u­ca­tion might re­duce teen preg­nan­cy. Her re­search al­so touched on whether learn­ing about sex would help al­le­vi­ate oth­er equal­ly im­por­tant top­ics. These in­clude sex­u­al­ly trans­mit­ted dis­eases and sex­u­al abuse which are both an area of con­cern for young adults in Trinidad and To­ba­go.

It is my be­lief that these is­sues need to be ad­dressed in a com­pre­hen­sive and age ap­pro­pri­ate way, through ed­u­ca­tion. This will fos­ter a more sex­u­al­ly re­spon­si­ble gen­er­a­tion. Hence, the process of learn­ing from your mis­takes would not be the route tak­en by a ma­tur­ing, pu­ber­ty-en­ter­ing young man or woman. In­stead, they will re­alise there are risks in be­com­ing sex­u­al­ly ac­tive at that age. Hav­ing learnt and af­ter be­ing prop­er­ly taught, young peo­ple would be more ob­lig­at­ed to make ma­ture de­ci­sions when it comes to sex.

Alexan­der John­son

Press Pass Cor­re­spon­dent

Uni­ver­si­ty of the West In­dies