Hong Kong Schools Don't Teach Sex Education. We Pretend They Do.

Last year I went to a parent-teacher evening at my son's primary school and I asked his form teacher what they covered in health education regarding puberty and sex. She was a perfectly nice woman who had clearly never been asked this question by a parent before. She blinked. She consulted a folder. She said: "In P5 we cover physical changes during growing up, and there is some content on personal hygiene and emotional health."

I asked if they talked about reproduction. She said there were some elements of that, yes, in the context of science.

I asked if they talked about sex. There was a pause that said more than her answer, which was: "We focus mainly on personal development and appropriate relationships."

So: no.

Let me be precise about what local schools in Hong Kong actually teach. In primary school, under the Personal, Social and Health Education (PSHE) curriculum or its equivalents, there are sections notionally covering puberty. In practice, this means: a lesson or two, usually in P5 or P6, on the physical changes that happen to boys and girls. The lesson involves diagrams. The teacher is not a trained sex educator. Nobody in the room wants to be having this conversation. Questions are technically permitted but socially impossible. The children emerge from these lessons knowing that puberty happens and perhaps that periods involve a "sanitary pad" (a phrase deployed without context), and very little else.

There is no discussion of sexual intercourse. No discussion of contraception. No discussion of sexually transmitted infections. No discussion of consent in any meaningful sense. No discussion of relationships, emotional safety, what a healthy relationship looks like versus an unhealthy one. Nothing about sexual orientation. Nothing about pornography and how it differs from real-world sex and relationships. Nothing about the emotional complexity of becoming sexually active. Just: diagrams of pubic hair appearing, some mentions of mood swings, hygiene.

Secondary school improves things marginally. Under the Life Education or Sex Education frameworks, some schools address STIs, reproduction, and contraception — but coverage varies enormously between schools, many teachers are visibly awkward, and the content is typically delivered in a way designed to inform without acknowledging that any of the students might already be doing any of these things or thinking about them.

Here is the situation this creates. Your child is not learning about sex and relationships from school in any meaningful way. They are learning from somewhere. That somewhere is: older classmates who know marginally more than they do, social media (TikTok, Instagram, Xiaohongshu), and for a significant number of them, particularly boys, pornography. By the time most Hong Kong teenagers are fifteen or sixteen, a substantial proportion have watched pornography. None of their formal education has addressed what pornography is, why it's not a reliable guide to sex and relationships, or the specific, distorted picture of gender roles and consent it tends to present.

I think about the economics of this and I find it almost comedically absurd. I pay HK$6,500 a month for my son's tutorial centre on top of school fees. I have paid for Olympiad maths preparation, Cantonese speech training, coding classes, swimming, piano, and Mandarin tutoring. I will spend — easily — a million Hong Kong dollars on his education between now and DSE. And nobody in that million-dollar programme is going to tell him, plainly, what sex is, what consent means, or how to treat the people he will eventually be intimate with.

We will spend any amount of money on his intellectual and professional formation and almost none of us can bring ourselves to say "penis" in his presence.

I asked my son what he knew about sex. He is now in P6. He shrugged and said "I know what it is." I asked him where he'd learned. He said "YouTube." This is almost certainly not entirely true but I let it go.

What I actually did at home, since school was evidently not going to help: I started talking. Not in one enormous conversation but in pieces, over time. I explained puberty in plain language — erections, ejaculation, masturbation, that these were normal. I explained what sex was. I explained that there were ways to prevent pregnancy. I told him that pornography existed and was not a good guide to what real sex was like. I told him that the most important thing in any sexual situation was that both people genuinely wanted to be there. I said all of this more or less plainly, over several conversations, over about eighteen months. It was deeply uncomfortable every single time. I did it anyway.

My husband eventually joined in, once I'd made it clear that this was not optional. He contributed less than I did, but he was present, which matters.

The gap between what schools provide and what children need is not going to be closed by waiting for the curriculum to improve. Hong Kong's education system moves slowly and this has never been a political priority. The gap is going to be filled by parents, or by TikTok and pornography. Those are the actual options.

I am a person who grew up never being told anything. I am a person who found the basics mortifying to discuss with my own children. I am telling you: do it anyway. You will be embarrassed. Your children will be embarrassed. Nobody will die of embarrassment. What you're protecting them from is considerably worse than an awkward conversation.