Sex education in cyberspace

Back in the eighties, there was this popular TV ad featuring a pre-“Ms. Saigon” Lea Salonga (complete with shoulder pads and teased hair) and the Puerto Rican boy band Menudo (whose youngest member was an almost pre-pubescent and likewise pre-out-of-the-closet Ricky Martin). They were dancing and singing about a helpline called “Dial-A-Friend.” For those who weren’t paying too much attention, it seemed they were endorsing yet another of those services for the lonely hearts or the problem-laden, for whom a younger version of Tia Dely was ever ready at the other end of the line.

Dial-A-Friend, though, was actually part of the first multimedia advocacy campaign to promote responsible teenage sexual behavior in the Philippines. For sure, even in the post-rotary dial era, a teenager wanting to know about sex can still call a helpline. More than likely, however, clicks trump calls.

Of course everyone knows anything and everything is on the Web. That includes unreliable sources of information on sex. Mona, a 16-year-old high school dropout says that all her former classmates used to get information online. “They go to porn websites,” she says matter-of-factly.

Mona herself won’t say where she first learned about the birds and the bees. But she certainly learned about it early, since she got married at 14.

The non-profit group Forum for Family Planning and Development (The Forum) estimates that seven out of every 10 women who are pregnant are teenagers. Not surprisingly, the abortion rate in this age group is also high: an estimated 64,000 each year, according to The Forum. That indicates an urgent need for some kind of intervention, but the Department of Education (DepEd) is still pilot-testing the integration of sexuality education in the curriculum of public schools. The delay in the move is said to be due in large part to the vehement opposition of prominent members of the Catholic hierarchy and their allied lay organizations; both argue that teaching teens about sex would only promote promiscuity among these youngsters, although various studies indicate otherwise.

Recently, however, The Forum introduced the Pinoy public to a website called Sexxie.tv, which primarily targets teens and young adults in providing free sex education online. Ironically enough, it began in straightlaced Singapore, and has since spread to Malaysia and Indonesia, and now the Philippines. SEXXIE stands for Sex Interactive Education by Health Professionals. The website’s edge is that it is manned by medical professionals – among them nurses, medical doctors, counselors, and other industry experts – who do real-time chat services to answer teenagers’ sexual-health related concerns. The site also features weekly “webinars” and medical fact sheets on topics such as stages of sexual growth and development, and sexually transmitted infections.

The founder of Sexxie.tv is Singaporean medical doctor Wei Siang Yu, who is more popularly known as Dr. Love in his island country because of his hit adult ‘edutainment’ TV show “Love Airways,” which is sponsored by the Singapore Health Promotion Board. Wei says he put up the website after he noted the dearth of reliable sources of information about sex as well as the life-altering consequences that wrong information about it could entail. It’s now getting tens of thousands of hits a day, he reports, with questions ranging from “Am I normal?” or questions about bodily changes during puberty, to the various risks of getting pregnant. The website was chosen recently by the World Health Organization as one of the 15 Global Showcases in the World.

L-R: Ms. Cecil Villa (Foundation for Adolescent Development), Dr. Wei Siang Yu (Sexxie.tv), and Rep. Mong Palatino (Kabataan Partylist). Photo by Che delos Reyes.

Wei attributes the site’s success to its best feature: its ability to provide anonymity to users. But he stresses that Sexxie.tv does not intend to remove the right of parents to provide sex education to their children.

Obviously, though, kids and teenagers are not turning only to the Net to get information on sex. Other “sources” are friends, who are often just as clueless as they are. This is why non-profit organizations such as LIKHAAN and the Foundation for Adolescent Development (FAD) have also come up with programs that aim to provide accurate information and training to youth leaders so that they would become “peer educators.” FAD, in particular — which was among those behind the original ‘Dial-A-Friend’ campaign of the ’80s — continues to train on-campus peer educators in various universities, even as it has also been providing sexuality information through its website, teenfad.ph, for almost a decade now.

Whenever the concept of sex education is discussed, the concept of “values” or more specifically “sexual values,” is almost always brought up as well. But according to Dr. Randy Dellosa, a certified psychiatrist and clinical psychologist who is more popularly known as a ‘shrink to the stars’, thinking about sex in terms of ‘values’ is “selfish,” as it is limited to the “personal level.” Dellosa says it is more important to think in terms of the larger social context surrounding sexuality, or what he calls “sexual virtues.” Concretely put, this is about thinking in terms of the repercussions that irresponsible sexual behavior would bring, he explains.

Dr. Randy Dellosa. Photo by Che delos Reyes.

Unfortunately, this is what is usually left out in the debates surrounding sexuality education and any legislative proposal on reproductive health. Sex education and reproductive health are discussed in large part as political issues, instead of the social and health issues that they actually are. And while the debates rage on in Congress and in the DepEd, teens, parents, and entire communities continue to suffer the repercussions of risky sexual behavior and teenage pregnancy.