By Caroline Milburn
ISLAMIC schools in Australia have adopted a sex-education policy aimed at overturning the influence of Western sexual values on their students.
Under the policy, non-Muslim teachers would be banned from teaching sexual health classes. Students would be taught that premarital sex and homosexuality were anti-Islamic and therefore prohibited.
Otherwise, Muslim teenagers were in danger of forming their attitudes to sex from un-Islamic sources such as newspapers, magazines, television and the internet, the policy said.
"Thus, Muslim youth may end up getting the wrong notion of sex, as for example, safe sex is OK," the document, Sex Education Policy, An Islamic Perspective, said. "It is imperative that the Islamic attitude to sex should win the race over the Western attitude to sex in reaching the minds of Muslim youth."
The policy has been adopted by private Muslim schools in Victoria and interstate, who are members of the Australian Council for Islamic Education in Schools. One of its authors, Mohamed Hassan, principal of Springvale's Minaret College, said Islamic sex-education classes would not include discussion about "safe sex" — the use of condoms to prevent sexually transmitted diseases — because it encouraged promiscuity.
Meanwhile, teen health experts have warned that sexual disease will become rampant among young Australians if state governments continued to avoid introducing a universal sex-education program into all schools.
A leading adolescent health expert, Susan Sawyer, said the nation's rising rates of sexually transmitted infections among under-25-year-olds could soon reach levels found in the US, where half of all sexually transmitted diseases occur in the under-25 age group.
She said the absence of a universal, school-based program meant too many adolescents were indulging in sexual activity that risked their health.
"For the past 30 years there's been very little change in the amount of focus on sex education in our schools, but in those 30 years there's been a dramatic increase in risks associated with sexual activity," said Professor Sawyer, director of the Royal Children's Hospital's Centre for Adolescent Health.
Teenagers are having sex at a younger age and with more partners, according to data from a national survey of secondary students in government and private schools. Rates of chlamydia in under-25s have tripled since 1994. The incidence of other sexually transmitted diseases such as gonorrhoea, HIV and syphilis is also rising.
There is no mandated, comprehensive sex education policy in Australia's government and private school systems. A spokesman for Education Services Minister Jacinta Allan said Islamic schools were in the independent sector and their handling of sex education was up to them.