Koushita Gouri Reddy V's Senior Project Blog

Project Title: S.E.T. In: Sex Education Transformation in India BASIS Advisor: Jen Smetanick Internship Location: University of Arizona and Arizona State University, hybrid remote Onsite Mentor: Dr. Bhakti Mamtora and Allison Stewart

Project Abstract

Growing up in India, I was aware of how purity culture affected how women were viewed. My senior research project aims to answer what curricula could India use to teach sex education to bridge the gap between culture/religion to the education sector in means of decreasing the importance and misinformation that India follows on purity when defining a person. Later, doing research, I realized that India has a cultural religious mythology that boasts a rich heritage of sexual awareness seen through their historical literature and sculptures in temples, thus the question of how did a country that was open about sex focus heavily on purity came to be. The significance of sex education cannot be overstated especially in India, a founding member of the United Nations, as it fails to answer article 26 of the “Universal Declaration of Human Rights [which] states: ‘Education shall be directed to the full development of the human personality and to the strengthening of respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms.’” (Sexual Education – Question of Morality or a Human Right?, 2019). In order to collect data I would collect the data posted online such as population tracking, historical understanding about sex education, overviews of the government’s response to the lack of a sex education curriculum, and curricula from other countries with similar conservative views which I would then combine to create a curriculum for India.