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Sex, Lies & Homework

While adults turn a blind eye, urban schoolchildren are playing high-stakes games inside a super-sexualised world, say Nisha Susan and Nishita Jha IN BENGALURU, the staf f of a large old-f ashioned Catholic school f or boys clutched their heads when they f ound a 9-year-old distributing porn. T here was a picture f or every sexual position, said the young counsellor called in to talk to the class. He was both shocked and amused. His shock was largely reserved at the elaborate nature of the gif ts the boy had handed out a copy f or each of his classmates, downloaded and printed at home and even spiralbound like a school project. T he counsellor had accidentally stumbled into the highly sexualised subculture of schoolchildren a world f ew adults have maps f or. While one may like to bemoan the loss of a halcyon, innocent childhood, the truth is that children have always been sexually active. Honesty and a decent memory would have most of us conf essing to at least one bumbling childhood experiment with a cousin or neighbour. What is new is not that young children are having sex. Nor can we prove that more children are having sex. What is new is that urban Indian schoolchildren are growing up in a sexually charged atmosphere and that sexual activity is directly related to social status. T he mating rituals of adolescence the wooing, the stringing along, the rejection, the acceptance, heartbreak, which have always been dif f icult enough are now closely documented and scored by the mean world of children without an adult in sight. T hink Lord of the Flies meets the Internet.

Illus tratio ns : Sud e e p Chaud huri

Unlike the counsellor, the staf f of a south Delhi Barista are more exasperated than amused. Almost every week they have to roust out children who have snuck into the cof f eeshops loo to make out. A f ew hours away in Jaipur, a bunch of 15-year-old boys in an international school joke that, if they dont get some quickly duniya hum pe thookegi (the world will spit on us). Some months later, a f ew seek sex workers to speed up the loss of virginity. Across the country in Mumbai, the only child at a dinner party, an 8-year-old, shuts down conversation when he casually tells the table that his two bus f riends were kissing on the way home that af ternoon. A lecturer f rom Bengalurus Mount Carmel College heard that her 19-year-old student had checked into a hospital f or an abortion and of f ered her support. She was surprised to see the girl alone and urged her to summon the boyf riend to the hospital. She was congratulating herself until the f ather arrived a conf used 16-year-old boy in school unif orm. Minis1 parents, two Delhi-based artists, might get some cold comf ort in hearing these stories f rom knowing that at this moment thousands of Indian parents are uneasily wondering whether they really want to know what is going on. Minis parents still dont know how to deal with what they f ound out. Mini is a dainty, extremely pretty 14-year-old. When she was 12, her f irst boyf riend and she were both eager to claim BT DT (Been T here, Done T hat) about oral sex. One evening at home alone, they tried it out, anticipating a def inite move up the social ladder. Sure enough, the next day at school her f riends congratulated her even while making f aces at the slight grossness in going down on a boy.

Unf ortunately f or Mini, her parents f ound out through the grapevine. T he horrif ied couple sent her to a psychologist to f ind out what was wrong with her. Shes been in therapy f or two years. Mini has no social lif e, no cellphone and a crushing weekly reminder in the psychologists of f ice of that impulsive evening. Today, while Mini opens up with some encouragement she remains silent in the presence of most adults, particularly her parents. T he shaming she received f rom her parents and the now long-lost f riends two years ago has lef t its mark. It does not help that her erstwhile boyf riend did not even receive a rap on the knuckles f rom his parents. While Minis parents f ound solace in cracking down harshly, other parents f eel more helpless. Ten-year-old Nitins mother, a Delhi-based psychologist, shares her anxiety: T here is only so much you can shield them f rom. I have asked my son not to surf the web except when Im present. But then he comes home f rom school and tells me about the kind of things he hears elder kids in the bus talking about. Where do I draw the line? Most parents, however, are like Soma, a Kolkata-based insurance prof essional who is absolutely sure her 14- year-old daughter and f riends are not sexually active, but uneasy at the amount of time they spend online. It may well be that Somas daughter is simply playing Farmville on Facebook. However, according to Dr Shelja Sen of Children First, a Delhi-based NGO, urban middle-class parents know little about the social lives of their children. She says grimly about school romance, Its not all about innocent handholding and pecks on the cheek. T here is a darker, grisly side most parents want to ignore. GOING ALL T HE WAY T HE ADULT truism that these days children know so much more than we do is of ten in with pride (in knowledge of cars, brands, computers) and sometimes bewilderment. Parents would probably be terrif ied if they realised that the urban schoolchild, of ten long bef ore her teens, is acquiring sexual experience at the same pace as other knowledge. In March, the Supreme Court of India had to state (while ruling on the Khushboo case) that premarital sex between consenting adults is not illegal, that live-in relationships are legal. While the discussion that f ollowed used the same old depleted words repression, prudery, f reedom, hypocrisy the ruling indicated a changed landscape of sexual conventions that adults are struggling to understand. People leave home earlier, marry later, marriages break up sooner, young men and women have more disposable income than ever bef ore. It is relatively acceptable to be gay. T here are still rules, but they are all new. Parents of adult children are reluctantly coming to terms with these rules. Are parents of schoolchildren ready? Can they understand their 10-year-old f loating about the house, nerves jangling because her f irst make-out session has been scheduled f or the weekend? How do they deal with f inding raunchy text messages on the cellphone of their 12-year-old son? Dr Prakash Kothari, f ounder of the World Association For Sexual Health, a man f amiliar to India through his ubiquitous sex columns, says that one reason children are sexually active earlier is because better nutrition leads to earlier puberty. He says of his new, young clients: T hirty years ago, only married couples came in looking f or advice on saf e sex and contraceptives. Today, young girls and boys walk in and ask about sex toys and tonics. Some even ask us if being high on LSD and charas will enhance their sexual experience.

A Bengaluru lecturer urged her pregnant student to call her boyfriend to the hospital. The father arrived: a confused boy in school uniform

T hink of the obvious and eye-popping implication children who seem conf ident enough to seek advice on how to increase pleasure where once a generation of men had to be trained by television to go into stores to demand, Moods, please. To parents who think that curtailing technology, and theref ore access to porn, will slow down these juvenile juggernauts, Dr Shekhar Seshadri, a leading child psychiatrist at NIMHANS, Bengaluru, points out drily that children are not merely exposed to porn. T hey are also growing up surrounded by mainstream culture which is f ull of inappropriate images. More importantly, he points out that there is a dif f erence between a child who (through conversation with adults) is processing what he has seen and one who has just f ragments of strange images and ideas f loating in his head. He says, Children growing up without processing what they see restrict the idea of sexuality only to the body or only to the act. T hey do not understand how women are commodif ied in porn. T hose who have grown up in the decades since the Moods ad know that Seshadri is right about sex becoming ubiquitous in popular culture. Weve chosen to be shocked and then be cool about premarital sex, adultery, homosexuality, teen sex. We have revelled in sex surveys, used sex to sell everything f rom toothpaste to tyres. You can also be sure that at this moment somewhere there is a young man taking deep breaths, preparing to demand, Moods please. For the urban upper-middle-class in their 20s and 30s, though, the biggest shif t has been the dethroning of sex f rom mysterious and allimportant to just another part of their complicated lives. T hese young people wince at the gnawing, narcissistic space that sex occupies in the lives of children. Take 14-year-old Akshay. He is tall and lanky, the son of a Delhi-based doctor-lawyer couple. For our conversation, he arrives at a f riends house in a chauf f ered car. Like many of the children interviewed, he puts on a show of being amused that anyone could be interested in something so pass. He is the acknowledged leader of his pack, thanks to the f ull-on distance penetrative sex he claims he has gone with a f ormer girlf riend. AKSHAY GAVE the interviewer a f ull once-over and inf ormed her that he was into older women especially ones with dusky skin. Ask him if he thinks people should wait to be married to have sex and he replies, T hese ideas are outdated, man. If it makes sense to you at 14, whos to say youre doing something wrong? A group of girls f rom posh Mumbai schools are amused when asked why they are having sex at 16. Whats the big deal? asks the most vocal of the gang, Anita, the heir of a large f amily business, throwing up her hands in disgust. If you have a connect, why should you wait? Children like Akshay and Anita are making rules f or themselves while adults continue to avoid this phenomenon in their peripheral vision. T he conventions that govern childrens sex lives are just as complicated and contradictory as those of adults, but the f irst and clearest directive is You should try to get some. Not having a boyf riend or girlf riend and not getting some sends you plunging to the bottom of the social snakes and ladders game. T he second directive is that penetrative sex is still the Big One. At 16, you will of ten need to justif y to your peers about going that f ar. Holding hands and hugging is a nonissue. Kissing is normal by the time you are 12. Af ter this steady ground, it gets complicated. T he rules are dif f erent f or the other pit-stops handjobs, oral sex, taking all your clothes of f . T heres no unif orm code. What is too soon or too f ar is judged by peers, based on how many people are doing the same thing in your class or circle of close f riends. In our interviews, the boys rarely talked of ideal relationships, but when they did it was about only in terms of celebrity couples such as the Beckhams or Jay-Z and Beyonce. Mumbai girls talk about who in their circle is their Blair or Serena (f rom the television show Gossip Girl) or who is more like Marissa and Summer (f rom The OC). When children experience a generation gap even with people a f ew years older, they certainly do not turn to their parents marriages f or a relationship roadmap. Neither do they have Indian pop culture to help them make sense of their lives. But at hand is that f ickle mother of noise television. AMERICAN REMOT E CONT ROL

In a story about childrens behaviour, its almost tiresome to see television being blamed but in this case, television is the only source of role models. Some of the most popular programming on recent American television have been shows about teens with million-dollar lif estyles f rom the eternal Calif ornia summers of OC to the New York chic of Gossip Girl. Its not like we want to be like them. We are just like them. And when they have sex, it makes us realise its okay f or us, too, says Mona, a shy and quiet 16-year-old f rom south Mumbai. Eighteen-year-old Alisha and 16-year-old Shivani are Delhi girls, the f ashionable daughters of a programmer f ather and nursery school teacher. Alisha describes the extent of OC role-play in her circle: Alishas slender best f riend was considered to be like rail-thin Marissa f rom the show. Alisha, who used to be plump until recently, was automatically typecast as Marissas best f riend Summer since the girls considered Summer chubby. (Look up Rachel Bilson, the waif ish actress who plays Summer, and decide f or yourself whether our kids are gripped with hatred f or their bodies.) T he identif ication with these shows is so close that Alishas best f riend decided to do it with her boyf riend af terOCs lead couple, Ryan and Marissa, did it f or the f irst time. T he pressure then began f or Alisha (aka best f riend Summer) to also pop the cherry. All this is recounted without any sense of its bizarreness.

Mini was 12. She and her first boyfriend wanted to say Been There, Done That about oral sex. One evening they tried it out

PSYCHOLOGIST T HOMAS Szasz said decades ago of America that there is a pervasive tendency to treat children as adults, and adults as children. T he options of children are thus steadily expanded, while those of adults are progressively constricted. T he result is unruly children and childish adults. As American pop culture becomes ubiquitous, this phenomenon becomes true f or all of us. Adults are seduced by these cynical, statusobsessed shows as much as teens. Take Serena, the blonde and perf ect protagonist of Gossip Girl. She lives in a f ive-star hotel. Her every move is blogged by peers. Limos to drive her to school, haute couture, expensive clubs, impulse holidays, and of course, the tangled, glorious sex lif e adult viewers lap up the f antasy of f lawless teen bodies and wealth without responsibility. For kids, theres the added attraction of a show that gets them. T hese shows understand important things like you cant be too thin or too rich; the coolest guy ought to be with the coolest girl; there is a thin line that separates the cool girl f rom the slut. T HAT S MY SLUT T Y FACE Gossip Girl particularly understands a world lived through the mnage trois of the digital camera, cell-phone and broadband connection. What sets apart the sexual experimentation among children f rom an earlier generations bumbling experiences is that it goes public instantly. Sixteen-year-old Shivani, Alishas younger sister, logs into to her Facebook account dozens of times everyday. Especially af ter she has posted a new prof ile picture. T he latest is a self -portrait in f ront of her bathroom mirror: shes dressed in tiny shorts and a midrif f -baring T-shirt, pouting suggestively at the camera. T hats my slutty f ace. It took f our shots to get that one right, she grins. Sample some of the 17 comments on this new prof ile picture: OMFG[2] you look soooo hot, biatch youre the best, thats my sex toy. Ask her how her f riends managed to get on Facebook on a school day and Shivani exchanges a patient smile with her sister Alisha who waves her iPhone in response an old gif t f rom her parents. Welcome to the tangled webs where everything f rom your new boyf riend to the colour of your bra is a status update. T his is

not just the old school grapevine magnif ied: it is a whole new beast that dislikes ref lection and abhors waiting. As soon as a f eeling arrives, it needs to be online. Every moment is a potential new prof ile picture. Most importantly, the television shows understand what Margaret Atwood once said: Little girls are cute and small only to adults. To one another they are not cute. T hey are lif e-sized. Adults who grew up bef ore Facebook may be baf f led by the instant and continuous online curating of minutiae that Gossip Girl characters and real-lif e children indulge in. But a more important clue about children lies in Gossip Girls cruelty, manipulations and obsessive status charting. If one thinks the public morality of Indian adults is particularly messy, then step into the private microcosm of the pseudoliberated schoolchild. RULE NUMBER One: If you want to keep your f riends, then bef ore having sex you must say you are in love, no matter how quick and sketchy the courtship. Good old lust has to be dressed up in f ine clothes bef ore it can be taken f or a walk. Announcing youre in love justif ies the intense passion that led you to bed and sets you apart f rom other boys and girls who randomly make out with each other or sleep around. (T he criteria f or love among children can be startlingly materialistic. Boys talk of wanting girlf riends with the requisite model statistics. A girl barely past puberty will tell you she wants her boyf riend to be on chummy terms with the managers of clubs and restaurants.) Rule Number Two: Boys are players. Girls are sluts. Children play out the same antiquated sexual politics that India and seemingly modern American pop culture suf f er f rom. T he old idea of boys naturally needing sex and girls needing to be coaxed or bullied into it still prevails. As Rashmi, a 17-year-old girl f rom a literary f amily in Jaipur, says, T he boy says, I really f eel f or you baby and the girl caves. Few girls admit seeking sexual pleasure themselves. How can they? At 13, your peers will laugh at you if your 15-year-old boyf riend dumps you f or not giving him a blow job. But theyre just as likely to shun you if you dont display the right amount of reluctance. Anita, the outspoken 16-year-old f rom Mumbai, is one of the f ew girls who acknowledged that she values sex f or its own sake and doesnt need an elaborate perf ormance of love. Each time she spoke up, the others in the group looked uncomf ortable. For many girls, it genuinely is the seduction that interests them games played out through endless Facebook wall posts and news f eeds making them the object of desire. Getting sex is a social victory rather than a personal one. As Dr Seshadri points out, Children also f eel pressure to say they are sexually active when they are not. In the same way that a woman once needed to be married and a mother to be acceptable, todays children f eel the pressure to say they have a boyf riend or a girlf riend. T hey do not know that love and sex is only one part of lif e.

Teachers are ignoring events raging like forest fires among the students pregnancies, forwarded MMSes, messy break-ups, attempted suicides

Rule Number T hree: No display of emotion unless you can make it cool. When relationships run into troubled waters, an intense perf ormance is played out f eigning nonchalance (She was just a bad f **k, He never really got me anyway) to being lovelorn and depressed in angst-ridden Facebook status messages (You broke me so I broke you back. How does it f eel?). T his circus the constant perf ormance of sexual cool almost, but not quite, makes you long f or the f urtive and thankf ully private gropings of all our repressed generations.

While the emotional equivalent of walking on broken glass has always f ollowed young hormones, some of the crises are particular to our times. As the world criticises the Catholic Church f or its enormous cover-up of child abuse, and as the rules about child pornography get tighter, we also have to deal with something newer than child abuse or pornography f or the f irst time, children have access to technology through which they can accidentally or deliberately produce and share porn. T hey can commodif y themselves and their f riends. Dr Shelja Sen says this sort of exploitation, where kids make their intimate photos and videos public, is extremely common in urban schools. Children mostly f ail to see what the f uss is. Girls who become vulnerable to vicious gossip are tagged as asking f or it. I MAKE KIDDIE PORN Sexting sending SMSes with sexually explicit messages or pictures of oneself is a strange ethical issue. One can argue its a natural extension of sexual expression. T hink of the passage f rom Z adie Smiths On Beauty where Howard, the middle-aged prof essor in bed with the gorgeous teenager Victoria Kipps, is astonished by her acrobatic comf ort with her body. T he mildly mean narrator explains this as the ease of a generation which grew up photographing itself in the nude. MMS scandals are the stuf f of tabloid dreams, but they begin with the intimate impulse of wanting to share your body. On the other hand, there is the obvious problem of these photos or videos escaping the closed pod of couplehood. One group of Delhi teens discussed how retarded their 14-year-old classmate was who agreed to strip on the webcam f or her boyf riend. T hey saw nothing wrong in calling her a slut and saw no grounds to criticise the boyf riend who f orwarded the video to all his f riends. ANOT HER EQUALLY big issue the severe assault on childrens body image is not limited to occasions when kids photograph or shoot videos of themselves. All of global pop culture ensures that even those whose bodies conf orm most closely to the ideal f eel pinpricks of dissatisf action. Early sexual activity and self photography ensures that the anxiety begins much earlier too. Dr Prakash Kothari, who talks of the conf ident children who come in demanding to know how to enhance their pleasure, reports that the oldest enquiry of all is my penis too small? continues to be posed f requently. And the elaborate def oliating, exf oliating, dieting of the modern girl now begins at a ridiculously early age. Girls barely past puberty are braving the pain of Brazilian waxes. Fragile, little girls talk continuously of being too f at. Says Dr Shelja Sen, While these adolescents may consider themselves physically mature f rom the moment puberty begins, they are emotionally f ragile. T his shows up in post-relationship trauma in the f orm of slashed wrists, depression, eating disorders among girls; drinking, drugs and racing among boys, and a general lack of interest in things like academics, sports, extra-curricular activities. Mugdha Raut, Mumbai-based gynaecologist and counsellor, sounds bemused when she says, T he youngest case Ive seen is of a girl who got pregnant at 13. But Raut indicates that pregnancies have reduced on her watch. Teenagers now pop emergency contraceptives pills all the time, and that leads to many other problems. Sometimes teens even come to us as late as af ter f ive months, when an abortion is illegal. T he reasons that some teens give f or getting pregnant, though, are bizarre: one girl told us that she got pregnant because she wanted her boyf riend to love her more! Leave it to Rashmi, the 17-year-old f rom Jaipur, to bring up what is considered the modern business of childhood studying. Rashmi explains that in schools where academic perf ormance f eeds into social status, there is additional peer pressure to maintain the soaring love story without allowing marks to plunge. Vinita, who teaches at a Gurgaon school, looks back at a 15-year career to tell a story many teachers can tell: Once we used to rarely see kids even holding hands. Now, theres pressure on all of them to spend their recess time in twos. And kids dont try to hide it. We dont get involved. But usually we know when theyve started dating since theyre either missing classes or sleeping in class because they were on the phone or the computer all night. You cant blame them. T hey are young and this consumes their thoughts. Vinitas school calls in children who they think might be in trouble and talks them through it, calling in parents when necessary. In most schools, though, teachers are more likely to ignore the events raging like f orest f ires through the student

community pregnancies, f orwarded MMSes, massive and messy break-ups, attempted suicides to the extent of not bothering to explain to a class why one of their group has suddenly disappeared. SCORING ON T HE SEX QUIZ In contrast to their swagger, children continue to have half baked knowledge about sex. Everything you ever wanted to know about sex and its accompanying myths is just a click away on the Internet, but watch while a group of teens are given a sex quiz. What is pre-cum? Pre-ejaculatory f luids, anyone? Conf used expressions. How do they deal with pregnancy or ST Ds? Blank looks all around. Do they know anyone who got pregnant? How did they deal with it? T here was this guy who was apparently drunk and he did it with this girl who got pregnant, and then she had to eat that abortion pill, 15-year-old Meera says in a matter-of -f act tone. Didnt they use a condom? Akshay, (the 14-year-old who likes older women) pipes up: D-uh. Youre supposed to eat a pill bef ore, then use a condom and then eat another pill af ter having sex. T hats how you dont get pregnant. Meera agrees, Yeah, or if you do it while youre on your period. Alternately, there is the Chandigarh group of teens who explain how pregnancy is not such an uncommon phenomenon af ter all: When my girlf riend told me she missed her period, I immediately arranged f or the money to take her to a doctor and get everything taken care of in a proper way. Where did you f ind the doctor? My brother had the same problem when he was in school, so I went to the same doctor. Ive even sent two f riends there. Is strict parenting the answer to all this? No. Love laughs at locksmiths. Love plus working parents plus disposable income plus technology knows no locksmiths. Kids manage to hide their adventures even in smaller, more vigilant cities like Jaipur and Chandigarh. Doing it on school premises, movie theatres and public loos is common. Several kids describe making out in parked cars af ter bribing their chauf f er. T he most popular venue continues to be that grown-up staple: a cheap hotel room f or a couple of hours or a whole night, af ter telling your parents the requisite f ib of a sleepover at a f riends place, making sure the latter knows enough to receive their calls. Children will f ind their ways as they always have. Even if you actually lock down your child, as Minis parents have, youd only have a deeply unhappy child and continue to f eel paranoid. PARENT ING BOOKS will tell you that long, cherishing conversations are the solution. Conversations through which your child will learn that she can tell you anything. Bengaluru-based childrens writer Sneha describes her observation of her 6-year-old sons discovery of the word snogging while reading the Harry Potter series. On another occasion she heard him using the word gay as an insult. She chatted with him and got him to consider what these words mean. T hese may be possible f or the alert and leisured parent, but not f or most harried adults. And even the most liberated parents dont want to hear their kids conf ess everything. T hey sometimes wish that the job of dealing with their childs messy sexual pleasures could be outsourced. Many children reveal that parents or relatives have sat them down f or the sex talk. Unf ortunately, they f ound they already knew f ar more than was f iltered down in that awkward conversation. Should schools be the source of sexual inf ormation f or children? Sex education in schools is either glaringly absent or bordering on the ridiculous, given in a language and tone so f ar removed f rom the pleasure-seeking and sensual world of raging adolescent hormones. Good touch, bad touch conversations protects them f rom predatory adults but not f rom themselves. Sex education is thus the object of much derision amongst children. Man, I should have taught that class! comes the universal joke. And this presumed knowledge gives embarrassed schoolteachers an excuse to skip even the basic lessons on sexual organs in Biology class (as opposed to separate sex education sessions), saying: You dont need me to tell you anything. You know everything. All this is apart f rom the states Gujarat, Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh, Karnataka and Kerala where sex education has actually been banned. While Indias raging HIV epidemic has already af f ected over 2.5 million Indians, knowledge of HIV is of ten limited to the red ribbon logo among upper-class children. T he truth is that parents on their own or schools by their bureaucratic selves are not capable of looking af ter

the needs of sexually experimenting children. Much debate awaits on what kind of sex education would work in this country. In India, where we live in multiple ages simultaneously, one can be sure that right now children are being married with the blessings of their parents. T hat there are poorer households where the simple f act of adults and children sleeping in the same, cramped space ensures its own variety of sex education. But there can be no doubt that intervention is necessary. Dr Seshadri says, Children who are not helped to build knowledge of what they see or hear do not know how to f orm happy, healthy, responsible relationships. Seshadri is part of a growing movement to include sex education as only one thread in lif eskills education a way in which children can understand and deal with the world, question what they see and hear. However much of the learning will happen outside the classroom. Which is why we need to f irst acknowledge that children (like adults) seek sex both f or pleasure as well as more complicated social reasons. As a culture, we have to ask ourselves what we are saying when we say that children know everything. We need to examine how closely the miniature subculture of urban children resembles the adult world increasingly materialistic, exhibitionist, love-starved, anxiety-stricken. And its our culture especially its pop variations that needs to respond to the special, particular needs of children. Because children dont know everything. (With inputs from Aastha Atray Banan in Mumbai) WRIT ERS EMAIL: nishasusan@tehelka.com nishita@tehelka.com