Teachers' Attitudes Regarding Sex Education to Adolescent

Sex education helps adolescents discover their sexual identity and protect them against sexual abuse, unwanted pregnancies and sexually transmitted diseases. Since sex education is not effectively conducted in schools, we aimed to determine the teachers’ attitude about sex education to adolescents. This crosssectional study was done on secondary and high school teachers in Yazd, southeast Iran. The teachers were selected randomly using cluster sampling. Data were collected using self-reported questionnaires surveying the teachers’ views on sex education. We found that the bulk of educational content teachers mostly focused on was related to issues such as maturity, menstruation, hygiene and ablution (91.7%) and moral values for premarital abstinence (88.1%). The most approved sex education concept by teachers was that sex education is one of the adolescents’ fundamental rights (73.3%) and sex education made marriage easier (72.2%). Teachers believe that the training must start from high school, be done by the school's health education teacher (47.5%) through educational pamphlets (71.6%). We found a significant difference between the school type and the attitude towards sex education (P=0.01). Teachers emphasized on the necessity of sex education as one of the fundamental rights of young adults and believe that sex education in schools must be mostly about issues regarding maturity, menstruation, hygiene, ablution and moral values for premarital abstinence. Health and educational system authorities should incorporate sex education in educational programs particularly in high schools with the help of health education teachers and proper educational pamphlets.