Rants & Raves of Jasmine’s Fiction

Singapore

recently launched a campaign to curb rampant sex habits of Malay teenagers after looking at this ‘very worrying’ data:-

1)  About a third of all teenage abortions in 2004 occur in the Malay community

2)  Half of all teenagers infected with STDs are Malay

3)  More than half of the 417 teen who gave birth in 2004 were Malay

So with this in mind, the government is feeding ethnic Malay teenagers the message that “it’s sexier to say NO” in the hopes that they will abstain from sex.  Yeah right.  While I’m not Malay and certainly not Singaporean, I find this campaign to be somewhat, ambiguous.  And relatively offensive.

Seriously.  Which direction are they going?  They come up with lines like “This shows that our community has matured and is now ready to discuss this issue in the open and do something about it collectively.”  Uhm, ok.  Nothing in it about condoms and safe sex.  This reads like the Christian campaigns in the

USA

.  Abstinence supporters are up-front about their crusade being “MORALLY BASED”.  It’s for your own good goes the tagline.

C’mon, teens will be teens and if the government thinks that they can stop these kids from bumping hips just by informing them to feel ‘morally decent’ they’ve got another thing coming.  Teenagers don’t listen to their parents, so listening to the government is oh-so-likely-to-happen.  The more they make it a taboo subject, the more kids want to find out and experience it.  Surely it is a better idea to give these already sexually active young people information on how to protect themselves from the itchy nasties and how not to get knocked up!

Then there’s the other direction this could go.  This is the one I find odious.  It involves preaching directly to the Malay community about abstinence (with the S’porean birth rates declining), stigmatizing innocent kids born to unwed moms (rather than treating all kids equally) and placing the blame of teenage abortion squarely on the shoulders of a MINORITY group (14%, hello?) over ALL the population.  Look at the data above!  Two thirds of teenage abortions are from other ethnic groups and the other half with itchy nasties are NOT Malay! 

They want the Malay kids to say “NO” now but to wait till they’re ‘older’ and ‘married’ to then go for it like rabbits to impede the population decline but I feel by then they will be so terrified and uneducated about sex that they will have “NO” idea what to do and how to do it!

But what do the Singaporean ethnic Malay teens think about this?  In a random street interview, views ranged from the thoughts that it’s great that the government is taking such an interest in their morality to the fact that government is a legitimised dictatorship and that they would rather have their sensitive areas infected with several nasty things than to listen to the authorities.  Then cometh the teeth gnasher!  Some kids thought that the government should make it a point to impose a modest dress code because boys will be tempted to have teenage sex if girls dress scantily. 

I shall refrain from making any comments on that last thought lest I digress too far from my original topic.  All comments and brickbats are welcome though.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 1st, 2006 at 9:42 pm and is filed under Current Affairs. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.