Pilot sex-ed program to cimbat 52 child prehancies a day

A pilot sex education project will be launched in Panama schools at the end of  March. After a five-year battle against entrenched religious groups blind to the 52 pregnancies a day schoolgirls aged 10-19 years

For more than five years, the Health and Education authorities have tried unsuccessfully to bring the Sexual Education Guidelines to classrooms, but the project has not been able to reach its goal because it has not received support from the deputies due to pressures from religious groups, which disqualified the guides.

This year the authorities have brought the issue back to the table. and d  a pilot plan aimed at middle and pre-middle school students, which is intended to be launched in public schools at the end of March. 
Professor Fernando Ábrego, from the Association of Teachers of Panama (Asoprof), explains that the guides are divided into two, their content and the application addressed to students, parents, and teachers. 

” Until recently, the content of the Sexual Education Guides was known by most of the teachers’ unions, after a consensus was reached between both parties, those who are in favor and those who are against it,”  he told El Siglo 

In the bilateral table meetings, the teachers have requested the document several times, without receiving answers from the Ministry of Education. According to Ábrego, they have only known the opinions of parents, a situation he considers a mistake.

” We are the ones who are going to apply the contents, if there is a secrecy, we will be quite slow, ” he says. 

Ábrego believes that this document alone is not the solution to the problem that is being experienced in the country, but the awareness that the Panamanian population may have. 

” It is said a lot that education begins at home and that it is reinforced in the classroom. But if at home there is no follow-up on what is learned in class and you do not talk openly with the sexuality boys, you will not see the results; we have to lower the figures and not only of pregnancies also of minors with sexually transmitted diseases, “he says. 

He adds that the objective of the society is not to see children raising children and that “the guides are a text that must be read, understood and explained.”  

Sociologist Marcos Gandásegui believes that today’s society is focused on young women being professionals before having children, unlike other times when youth pregnancies were common among families. 

In relation to the pilot plan, Gandásegui points out that they are necessary because boys and girls now do not think the same as before and should be well oriented, especially respecting equality between genders.