Sex education in Bangladeshi culture: A personal story
Trigger warning: sexual assault
As a child growing up in Bangladesh, I was aware of sexual harassment and the male gaze way before I knew what sex was. Before I had even hit puberty. This is a funny little phenomenon that happens in South Asian cultures, where giving the ‘birds and bees’ talk to children is not a common practice. On the flip side, it is a society where sexual harassment and violence are commonplace for women and girls in public spaces.
So what brought forth this awareness? Now that I think back, it started with little things. Little changes in the way I was supposed to dress and behave. Like my mother telling me to start wearing an orna (shawl) when I was ten. Or my aunt telling me I could not help my male cousins with grocery shopping, because girls are not supposed to go to places like bajars (markets).
These small comments signaled to me that my life was changing. I was not sure why, though. There was always this air of mystery and ‘hush hush’ when it came to instructing tweenage and teenage girls on how to behave. But I knew it had something to do with girls growing up into women.
During this time, Bollywood was also a big part of my life. As any Desi kid will tell you, Bollywood can give you very twisted ideas about sex and relationships. Back then, the only depictions of sex in Bollywood movies were either rapes and/ or unwanted pregnancies. A woman who does do the unmentionable (whether it was consensual or not) was portrayed as having lost her izzat (dignity). This was very problematic because it implies that sex is something bad or unnatural, and if two people do have sex the woman (even though she is portrayed as having no sexual agency) has to take responsibility of its consequences. These representations also helped shape the way I was introduced to sex.
There were also big things, big in my mind at least. Such as a time when I was ten years old and I was visiting a jewelry shop in Dhaka with my mother. I noticed a young man sitting outside and staring at me. My gut told me there was something wrong with that gaze — I was uncomfortable and scared. He was then joined by a friend; both men stared at me and snickered amongst themselves for the remainder of our visit in that store.
Not too long after, an employee at my school molested me. He worked at the little stationery store on campus that sold notebooks and journals. I went there alone after school one day to buy a notebook. Taking advantage of the situation, he grabbed me and kissed me aggressively all over my face and mouth. It might have lasted for only a few minutes, but to me it felt like hours.
I was haunted by this last incident for the remainder of my childhood and even some of my teenage years, because I could not make sense of what had happened to me. With the limited information from my family and the media, I concluded that I was to blame somehow for things that were happening to me: I was too female, too vulnerable. I had acted too free. I should not have gone to the store alone.
I could not articulate my experience to anyone. I know I tried. I told my friends and my mother, but in the vaguest of terms. I did not have the vocabulary to describe how violated yet guilty I felt. I wondered if I had ‘lost my dignity’ and would become pregnant.
Thankfully, this phase of confusion when both men and women were reacting to my changing body did not last long. We moved to Canada just before I turned 12. Canada was, of course, a culture shock. There were the obvious changes: the people, the weather, the food, etc. The biggest change, though, was that there was no mystery about sex, bodies and sexuality. There was no ‘hush hush’ about bodies. I discovered a lot just by hearing my classmates talk. Majority of the time, I had no idea what they were talking about because I still did not know what sex actually was. By then, my mother had told me about periods, but the explanation was limited to ‘women bleed every month’ and there was no explanation on the biology behind it. In school, there was a lot of pretending and playing catch-up on my side — acting like I understood everything whenever my friends veered the conversation towards sex.
I started the sixth grade when I moved to Canada. Everyone in my class had gone through the mandatory sexual education class in the fifth grade. Thankfully, the school board decided to have a refresher sex ed for my batch when we were in the eighth grade. Apparently, the rise in teen pregnancy indicated that one class in primary school was not enough. For me, this was a blessing. Now I had all the pieces of the puzzle. I understood all the conversations around me, but more importantly, I began to comprehend what had happened to me while I was growing up in Bangladesh. It would still be a long time before I made peace with what had happened to me, but the process had started.
Sometimes, I wonder what my life would have been like if I had stayed back in Bangladesh. I guess I would have gotten a sex ed eventually through biology class in school, but the earlier misconceptions I had probably would have stuck well into adulthood. I probably would have accepted harassment as a way of life, instead of speaking out against it. I would probably not see safe access to public spaces as a basic human right as I do now.
I am not saying that my experience is every Bangladeshi kid’s experience. I am sure some have had happy childhoods, while some have had it worse than me. I am not even raving about Canada’s education system, which still has its flaws. Too many women, especially Bangladeshi women, feel responsible for the sexual harassment they endure — some of which start when they are very young, too young to even understand what is happening to them. That mindset comes from the absence of an open discussion about sex early in their life and the veil of secrecy around sex.
April is Sexual Assault Awareness Month. Research shows that the majority of child victims of sexual abuse about are children 12–17. However, it is difficult to ascertain the accuracy of statistics like these, given that most us, even as adults, are unaware of what sexual assault really is. So, does continuing to make sex and bodies a taboo subject in our culture help anyone?
