Sex education at school stressed to combat sex crimes

“The government created piles of measures to prevent sexual crimes but how can you stop sex offenders who are determined to do what they want? We need the power of education to prevent people from seeing another person not as an object with which to satisfy one’s desire but as a human being. Who gets sex education at school properly?”

The father of an 8-year-old girl "Na-young" who was raped by sex offender Cho Du-soon gave an unexpected solution to stopping sex crimes. In an interview with The Dong-A Ilbo, he said, “It occurred to me that proper sex education is the solution.”

Is Korean society providing adolescents the proper sex education? Is it simply focused on biological facts such as different physical characteristics, pregnancy and childbirth instead of human relations based on love between a man and a woman and mutual respect?

Dong-A surveyed 285 public school students in Seoul on last Wednesday. Among 100 high school boys, 66 percent said they have had the impulse to satisfy sexual desire by force. Among the survey sample, 28.4 percent gave the same response.

Only 23.5 percent answered "likely (including highly likely)" to the question, “Did your sex education teacher’s recommendation work to satisfy your sexual desire?”

Among male high school students, 52.6 percent said they had seen child pornography at least once.

Sex education at school did not teach students how to prevent sex crimes. It simply explained biological facts such as the differences between men and women, pregnancy and childbirth. Three times more students (59.7 percent) said they learned about sex from sex education courses at school rather than the Internet. Given this, schools have failed to response to student curiosity of sex.

Among those committing sex crimes last year, 79.2 percent had graduated from high school and 32.9 percent from college. Unlike the public expectation that sex offenders did not have a normal school life like Goh Jong-seok, the 23-year-old perpetrator in the Naju rape, most such predators were educated.

Kwak Dae-gyeong, a police administration professor at Dongguk University in Seoul, said, “This proves that gaining the ability to deter sex crimes is impossible without the proper sex education at school despite a good academic background.”

Experts say sex education should be focused on preventing sex crimes and building desirable relations between male and female.

“Sex education just informs of the biological differences and not how to behave, so it rather encourages sexual crimes in certain aspects,” said Nam Seung-hee, a youth development and education professor at Myongji University in Seoul. “Sex education at school should be revamped to correct incorrect perceptions, language and acts pertaining to sex.”

neo@donga.com