Chinese teenage helpline swamped with sex queries

BEIJING - A mental health helpline set up for teenagers in China is now being flooded with queries - most of them related to sex.

Zhu Guangyu, in charge of the Hotline for Teenagers’ Mental Health, in northeast Heilongjiang province, has been a psychological counsellor for over 20 years, but he says he is still shocked at so many tender voices asking questions about sex.

The helpline is a government support project to address teenagers’ mental health problems, both for the under-aged and for their parents, Xinhua reported.

The line, which started in July, has received 900 calls over the past four months, and over 200 were related to sex, Zhu said.

Among the problems, according to telephone records, were: a 12-year-old boy was addicted to porn websites, a 17-year-old boy could not help falling into extreme sexual fantasies, an 18-year-old girl doubted about her potential ability to become pregnant due to her having two previous abortions.

“Up to 87 percent of these questions about sex were raised by the teenagers themselves, which means they are desperate to learn about sex, and proper instructions are missing from the school and their parents,” Zhu said.

Although China has set up sex education courses in elementary and high schools in big cities since the beginning of this century or even earlier, the education the students received is far from satisfactory.

“Some schools consider knowledge about sex as being unhelpful for the students to pass their college entrance exams, and some teachers are too shy to discuss sexual matters during class,” Zhu said.

In Harbin, provincial capital of Heilongjiang, it is hard to find any curriculum that includes sex education, and the section about sex in course books are often skipped.

“Our teacher just left those ’sensitive’ pages, asking us to read them ourselves after class,” a high school student said over the phone.

Not only school teachers, parents also find it difficult to talk about sex in front of their children.

Li Dejun, father of a 17-year-old girl, is reluctant to provide education about sex to his daughter.

“I can’t see why talking about it would help her,” said Li.

However, Chinese society has now become much more tolerant about sex issues. Premarital sex and abortions have gradually been accepted, and words like “one night stand” are no longer taboo.

According to a survey by the National Working Committee on Children and Women, 60 percent of teenagers have an open attitude about premarital sex and 22 percent already have had sexual relations.

Among those who have had premarital sex, more than half did not use birth control methods, risking the contracting of diseases, pregnancies and abortions.

“The disturbing survey results have challenged our education towards sex, which was why we thought it necessary for teenagers to have a hotline to turn to,” Zhu said.

Zhu is confident that the helpline might make up, in a small way, the missing education about sex.