After Every Case of Assault, the Same Question: What Are We Not Teaching Boys?

For years, sex education in India was spoken in the language of fear- "Don’t do this or you will get HIV." "Don’t do that or you will get pregnant." It was built to spread fear but it never really worked for young people. That script never accounted for what actually defines adolescence: curiosity, attraction and confusion, says Arti Shukla, who runs the teen platform Teenbook who work closely with psychologists and counsellors to help teens understand themselves better and also answer their most uncomfortable questions. Then after over a decade experts realised that fear alone didn't work, so they moved to clinical data, something similar to biology lessons which stripped the subject of all context. What was missing in both was the emotional

reality of being a teenager.When platforms like hers began talking openly about bodies, relationships and feelings, without stigma or moral judgement, teens showed up on their platform not just with casual curiosity, but with deeply personal questions about what was happening to their bodies, about desire and about love and a confusion they had no language for. She adds that people would be surprised to know that despite growing up in a hyper-connected world, most of them are navigating this alone.“The biggest myth is that because they have the internet, they know more,” Aarti says. “The reality is that they don’t. They have fragmented information and they are very lonely.” The assumption that access means understanding collapses quickly when you look closer at them and their queries. What teens often have are half-answers from YouTube videos, random forums or pornography, all the sources that are easy to access but rarely reliable. What they don’t have are safe, consistent conversations. They are not speaking to their parents. They aren’t always speaking to friends. And when adults stay silent, that silence gets filled by more misinformation.

They Are Googling Their Bodies, Not Understanding Them

The gap is even sharper when you look at gender. She says girls at least have an entry point. Menstruation, regardless of how awkwardly it is taught in schools, gives them some vocabulary to talk about their bodies. Over time, many develop a more nuanced understanding, even if it is incomplete.Boys, on the other hand, are largely left out of the conversation. “There is almost nothing for boys. They end up relying on porn or whatever their friends tell them.” This absence is striking, especially because boys often have more access to the outside world (to pharmacies, to doctors, to decision-making spaces within relationships), in fact they are in many cases, the ones making choices. But no one is teaching them how to understand those choices.

Experiences like nightfall or masturbation are still clouded in shame and even the language reflects it. The term 'swapnadosh' frames a natural biological process as a defect. “No one is telling them this is normal. So they grow up with confusion and guilt,” she says.The way these classes are structured in schools doesn’t help either. When it exists, it is often segregated where boys are in one room and girls in another as if their worlds will never intersect. “We separate them while teaching, but expect them to come together later and navigate relationships,” Aarti says. “It doesn’t work that way and that's why so many struggle with them later in life.”What gets lost is the ability to build a shared vocabulary around consent, boundaries, communication, discomfort. What most schools offer are one-off sessions where a counsellor or doctor comes in, speaks about menstruation or 'good touch, bad touch' and leaves. The conversation begins and ends in a single sitting. But adolescence doesn’t work like that. What’s needed is continuity and conversations that evolve with age and space where they can ask questions in different ways, at different stages of growing up.

The Conversations Missing From How We Raise Boys

Ironically, it is only when something goes wrong like a case of harassment, assault, or misconduct that the conversation suddenly becomes urgent. But even then, it often gets turned into conversations about morality rather than education. The focus shifts to what should have been done, what shouldn’t have happened, how behaviour needs to be regulated. “Sex education at this point becomes a morality discussion. Instead of helping young people understand and manage situations, we try to control them.”The fundamentals like consent, emotional awareness, respect, the ability to handle rejection or discomfort, remain underexplored. And so, each time there is outrage, it is followed by the same question: how did this happen? The answer often lies in what was never taught. At the heart of it all is a persistent misunderstanding that sexuality education is about teaching children how to get intimate but it's not! "It’s about helping them make informed, healthy decisions,” she says. It is about giving them the tools to understand their bodies, navigate relationships and deal with emotions that can otherwise feel overwhelming. And perhaps most importantly, it is about closing the gap between what they experience and what they are allowed to talk about.For parents and educators, that gap can feel uncomfortable but avoiding the conversation doesn’t eliminate the need for it. “Adults need to deal with their own discomfort first,” Aarti says. “Once they do, they will realise these are not impossible conversations.”In a world where teens are already exposed to explicit content on streaming platforms, to sexualised narratives online, silence is no longer a form of protection, it just makes them more vulnerable. The answer isn’t to overcorrect or to interrogate, it is to be available, she suggests. If they don't find answers through the right mediums, they will still keep searching. Only, instead of understanding their bodies and relationships, they will be left trying to decode them, one misleading search result at a time.