By Karolina Kopek. As I spend more time in Shanghai, my field notes are exploding – they grew from from 5 to 20 pages in the past week! The best part is that I am getting this much valuable information in interviews as short as half an hour.
Today was quite a hectic day in the Minhang campus. Also, adventurous – taxi driver took me to the wrong university, I got lost on campus and could not find WiFi for two hours. Very frustrated at 11am, I found a cute kitten family and miraculously connected to the nearby building’s Internet. I then met up with my first subject whom I was introduced to about a week ago.
I networked on the spot all throughout the day and managed to interview more than ten girls! I continued to receive very homogenous responses when it came to gender roles, improvements in equality, and gender discrimination in the workplace. Interestingly enough, the topic of sex education kept coming up and I decided to incorporate it into all of my interviews. Being a sex educator myself, I was curious about the Chinese students’ experience with it. They generally spoke of having none or inadequate sex education in high school, seeking out information on their own. Even though most of them claimed they are not sexually active, they would feel prepared to protect themselves against pregnancy and STD/STIs.
I was completely mindblown by my last interview in which I asked two girls about their knowledge of birth control. They showed vague knowledge but mentioned pills – they knew this method existed but knew nothing about it and had no access to it. I decided to show them my own pill pack followed by responses of awe. These girls were seeing something so commonly used by the Western population for the first time and even took pictures with it… At that moment I was reminded how important sex ed really is and how many populations are completely sheltered from it, something I always knew but never truly experienced.
I now ponder about the direct relationships between inadequate sex ed, one child policy, the prevalence of abortions, and negative attitudes towards it amongst the Shanghai residents. One would think that education would be enforced with such a strict policy, not only to avoid abortion costs but to simply make pregnancy prevention easier for the general population. This does not seem to be the case due to continued stigma associated with premarital sexual behaviors in China.