Learning to 'ask for consent' with the students from Government School

“It is wrong to make a girlfriend and that guy over there said he has one. It’s bad”

The second workshop with the adolescent students of Government school on ‘How are babies born’ started with this very question. Have they ever asked this question? Or do they ever think about it? Or what does being attracted to someone else means? how does the feeling of attraction, like or love feels? One of the most crucial part of adolescence conversation involves divulging into the fact that puberty is the process of making them sexual beings and interestingly this very notion is left out, ignored or taken for granted by people around adolescents. This ignorance or fear of telling them more than age or what if they lose their innocence (mind you this is a huge myth) that lead to different feelings and thoughts that includes confusion, irritation, shame, disgust and so on. With this clear objective, we engage on sex education with the adolescents so that with the comprehensive knowledge on these most taboos they can make better choices.

In the first activity, the participants were invited to share if they have heard, seen or what comes to their minds when they hear the word! Most of them denied having heard the word but few of them shyly almost terrified responded in affirmation.

Through a short film where a 10 years old boy asks his father about how babies are born, we talked about what is sex, who engages in sex and what does it mean?  

In the next part, we engaged on what condoms are and how they have more purpose than not getting your partner; they ensure safe sex and protects you from sexually transmitted diseases. The silence in the workshop was palpable – it seemed that this information was something they were hearing for the first time so we gave them few minutes to soak in.

In the last part of workshop, through the story of a girl and boy, we talked about what consent is – what does asking for consent actually means?

“She would slap him tightly”

“She would complain to her parents, teachers or someone elder”

“She would kiss back”

“Don’t know how she would react”

“If she liked the kiss then she would respond”

It was ironical to see that the participants who believed that having a girlfriend is wrong out rightly said that the girl would kiss back. With the help of responses we talked about how important it is to ask the person before engaging in anything be it kissing, hugging, holding hands and definitely sex. We also enquired the feelings and thoughts around what happens when someone is touched without their consent, how socialization of boys and girls are different and finally the media representation of relationship which actually promotes exact opposite of consent. The absence of these conversations in households and schools have led to a society where it seems okay to violate consent right and left and non-recognition to the simplest yet most crucial fact that violation of consent is VIOLENCE