As HEART continues to work with Islamic schools and educators on health education programming for their youth, we learn of many unfortunate anecdotes about the lack of information (or the abundance of misinformation) regarding sexual health that is present among Muslim youth. In our conversations with educators, we learned of a 5th grade girl who began menstruating and missed three weeks of school. She refused to confide in anyone, afraid she was dying. Another girl who was pressured to “try everything but sex,” unaware that while pregnancy may not be a direct consequence, she was exposing herself to sexually transmitted diseases.
We also learned of a girl who didn’t know the details of reproduction and how babies were conceived until college because her parents
repeatedly pulled her out of sex education classes.
HEART has discovered that too many Islamic schools are not offering sex education at all, except in the context of the legalities
surrounding ghusl and wudu. As for the Muslim children who attend public schools, too many parents remove them from sex education
classes, afraid that the information might lead to promiscuity and believing such information is irrelevant for them because “our girls
just don’t do that.”