I am a comprehensive sexuality educator within the youth-led, peer-to-peer learning model of the Know Your Body, Know Your Rights Programme at The YP Foundation. In other words, I am a 23 year old who spends two hours every Sunday facilitating CSE sessions with 14 to 18 year olds in an urban village in Delhi NCR. Alongside this, I am also a young woman in the first year of her first-ever romantic relationship.
Every weekend, I meet a room full of teenagers and talk about different things that CSE comprises, including relationships. In my cohort, there are confused teenagers, all-knowing teenagers, love-struck and lovelorn teenagers, confident and hesitant teenagers, defensive and curious teenagers. When I talk to them about healthy and unhealthy behaviours in relationships, I often find myself mentally checking my own relationship against the red flags and green flags we discuss. When I prepare a session on contraception or sex, as a newly dating young adult, I might, myself, learn something new or be surprised by a question that I never thought of. These experiences have made me realise that CSE can be inclusive not only in terms of information and the recipients of information, but also in the space it holds for the educator.
In my weekly sessions, CSE thus becomes a way of knowing myself and knowing others. Sometimes a simple question or prompt can lead to a discussion that reveals how a person thinks. As a facilitator and educator, you are supposed to hold the revealed thought carefully, and gently examine it through a rights-based, feminist, inclusive, intersectional lens. But before you guide anyone into learning/unlearning, you first understand where they are coming from. CSE can be surprisingly intimate in that sense. It feels like a love language you can use to speak to yourself, your partner, your friends, your cohort of teenagers in an urban village.
My sessions have also shown me that young people love learning new things, new facts, new objective truths. Their craving for interesting information is almost tactile. What they do not always enjoy is being challenged, or having to abandon a belief they think is their own, even if that belief was fed to them by a carefully curated algorithmic reel. But they do not argue with cold facts. If someone believes abortion is illegal in India, and you tactfully show them the MTP Act with its amendments and conditions, they will usually come around. But whether abortion should be legal, and whether it should be unconditionally so, is a value question. And, in CSE, sustainability rests more on values than on facts alone.
The YP curriculum brings information and value clarification together in a way that is intentional and continuous. As a CSE educator, and as someone who believes in what the curriculum stands for, I have lately begun to feel a deeper frustration towards media and messaging that spread inaccurate, incomplete or harmful ideas about gender, sex, relationships, power etc. I might think I am sure of my knowledge and my values, sure enough to see through certain kinds of content. I have tried to transmit this knowledge and discernment to my cohort, but like a parent who stays wary of their child’s ability to resist bad influences, I worry because I cannot expect them to react to content in the same way that I might. I watch a problematic trailer of a new Bollywood film and I fear it might undo the work I have done with them. When an adolescent in a session once remarked that girls have a tendency to betray their boyfriends, I asked how many others agreed, and soon both boys and girls began debating that one statement. But no organisation can run an endless series of sessions with the same group. There comes a point when you let them return to a world where a song’s lyrics, a stranger’s tweet, a family member’s advice, or a friend’s breakup story can unravel what we have built. Then the question becomes: what is it that will help them hold their ground in those moments? It is the strength of values, of course. Between knowledge, skills and values, one clearly holds the weight of sustainability more than the others. Values themselves can inspire the growth of the other two, I believe.
Value clarification can take the form of an activity where participants stand in opposite corners of the room depending on whether they agree or disagree with a particular value-laden statement. They can justify their positions, listen to those who stand elsewhere, and even try to convince each other of why their own stance feels more valid or reasonable. A lot of questions we explore do not have clear right or wrong answers, and it then becomes important to help them understand that in the absence of inherent correctness or incorrectness, it is our values that guide us. Value clarification can also be ticking a point on an imaginary scale from strongly disagree to strongly agree. It can be a hand raised or placards flipped green or red. It can be written reflections, diary-like answers, or sentences they complete themselves. These small exercises help them understand why they believe what they believe, and whether they want to keep believing it.
Sometimes, when a topic feels too open-ended for easy conclusions, discussions might seem hopeless. We might debate the ‘right’ time for a person or a couple to have a child, knowing fully well that there is no universal correct age. There are no one-word answers, and that is why we debate. After all, we would not waste time debating whether winter is colder than summer (facts resolve themselves). Values, in contrast, ask us to think, negotiate, empathise, and grow.
When values clarification is woven into informational videos, primers, case studies, games, it helps participants of even a limited CSE-session series stay anchored. As an educator who learns every weekend along with the adolescents I teach, I see this more clearly each time. CSE survives in information as well as in the values that carry it forward.
Cover image by Sean Stratton on Unsplash
