By Sya Taha, co-founder of Crit Talk

On Saturday, 17 November 2018, Crit Talk, an AWARE Power Fund grantee, conducted a ‘Positive Parenting and Intimacy’ workshop to kickstart a conversation between parents on how to talk to their children about sex and their bodies.

Positive parenting means providing loving guidance to children to keep them safe and healthy. Research shows that talking to children about sex and personal boundaries at an early age can protect them from or mitigate child sexual abuse, and later on, unsafe sexual practices and unwanted pregnancy.

Conversations about bodies, sex and sexuality can be difficult, especially if we did not grow up being able to ask our own parents about these issues. Crit Talk co-founders, Sya and Saiful, felt that as young parents, there needed to be more discussions with other like-minded parents about how to handle ‘awkward’ or ‘inappropriate’ questions that children sometimes asks.

It was heartening to see so many fellow Muslim parents who were dedicated to being more open with their children about sex. Framed within an overall objective of preventing situations of sexual abuse, the workshop started with getting the participants to think about what myths they had been told growing up. Some examples given were: ”Whisper’ is a brand of shoulder pads’, ‘Babies come from Allah’, ‘If I want a sibling I must eat more chicken’ and ‘Only girls are pressured into sex’. The facilitators reflected briefly about the way the participants felt when they later found these to be untrue. One important feeling brought up was that of betrayal and how this spurred some participants to seek a different path of parenting for their children.

Many of the sex ed myths offered by the participants seemed to revolve around adolescence. Perhaps this was one of their most salient memories because of it being a formative period in their lives. It was reiterated that adolescence would be too late to start talking about sex, however most participants with toddlers seemed to be already open to speaking matter-of-factly about private parts and appropriate and inappropriate touching.

Participants broke out into small groups to discuss about what they would have liked their parents to tell them and what they felt had been beneficial for them. Some of the more uncommon things included: a father demonstrating how to use a condom on a banana, and receiving an informative sex ‘encyclopaedia’ with diagrams.

The workshop ended with optimistic reflections from the participants that they would keep trying to be open with their children, offer them a safe space, and look for resources, such as books, to continue having conversations with their children.

ABOUT THE ORGANISER:

Crit Talk aims to provide a safe space for self-identified Muslims to discuss taboo topics and their unique experiences. They run regular focus group discussions on topics such as masculinity and feminity and interfaith. Crit Talk is also a recipient of AWARE’s own Power Fund, which focuses on mentoring emerging organisations.