Badminton now seems to be the go-to solution to escape the urge for ‘undesirable activities’ — sex, to put it with rude nakedness. This is Hong Kong’s healthy idea. Sex education for schoolchildren in Hong Kong would be better described as sex escape; its declared purpose is not to encourage young people to ‘start dating or having sexual behaviours early in life’. Amused young people seem to think that the policymakers have their heads in the clouds, since their Victorian admonitions are so dramatically out of sync with the realities in the age of hi-tech and social media. Teenagers may be perfectly comfortable with ‘friends with benefits’, so they have delightedly changed the phrase to ‘friends with badminton’. This response should be enough to indicate how regressive the official sex education materials are. But the educators insist on imposing a ‘moral imperative’ instead of teaching children to understand their own bodies and impulses. The moral imperative apparently puts strict limits on loving as well. Those in a ‘love relationship’ are to fill out a form — yes, a form — setting the bounds of their intimacy.

Can growing young people be protected from their own sexual development? Hong Kong’s sex education — the education bit is strangely lacking — is meant to protect them, especially the children between 12 and 14. The result is absurd, possibly ineffective, even more possibly, harmful. The emphasis on prohibitions always drives the targeted activity underground and can make innocent children feel furtive and shady. India goes a step further. Discussions of sex are usually taboo, even within families. There is no consistent policy for sex education and states such as Gujarat, Maharashtra, Chhattisgarh and Madhya Pradesh have banned it in schools. One state government declared that sex education had no place in Indian culture — this is the land of the Kamasutra however — and planned to introduce yoga instead. Would badminton have been more enjoyable? Perhaps it is the association of yoga with self-control that prompted the plan.

Yet this is a country crying out for graded, carefully thought-out sex education. It still ranks, after its drop from peak infections, third among countries with the largest HIV
epidemic. The hypocrisies of Indian society compound the stupidity about sex education. Pre-marital sex is unacceptable, yet minor or teenage marriage still thrives in which the girls are ignorant of outcomes and are soon bearing children. Teenagers are left with technology to learn what they can about sex. With no guidance, this is not always a good thing. Social media platforms, pornography and images of lifestyles far removed from Indian reality can have strange impacts on impressionable, not-always-educated minds, leading to crossed signals, wrong sexual values and approaches, misunderstandings and, most alarmingly, sexual violence. Just as a moral imperative may mislead in situations of intimacy, so no guidance at all may result in much greater damage. Hiding behind badminton or yoga is no escape.