“He is a seventh grader. He disseminated a hot girl’s sex clips to classmates. In the classroom, he and a girl embraced each other in front of me, a teacher that he met for the first time,” Vu Thu Huong, a teacher with a PhD in the Psychology faculty at the Hanoi University of Education.

Do Thuy Linh, a parent from Dong Da district in Hanoi, said she wasn’t surprised about this.

“Vietnamese students nowadays enter puberty sooner than we did in the past. A seventh grader now could be 1.6 meters tall and can easily search for information about sex on the internet,” Linh said.

Lien Huong, whose daughter is an eighth grader in Hanoi, said children enter puberty earlier than previous generations, but she doesn’t think sexual intercourse is acceptable for a seventh grader.

She doesn’t know if she can give sex education lessons to her daughter in the right way.

"If your child is good at school and obedient at home, you won’t be able to discover his early sexual activities,” she said.

A mother who asked to be anonymous said she accidentally read messages that her daughter sent to her classmate when they talked about a ‘hot boy’ in the class. The words ‘A slept with B’ were seen repeatedly in the messages. The girl once told her mother that a ninth grade schoolboy ‘slept with four girls from four classes’.

“I was shocked about what my daughter said and I went to a psychologist for help,” she said.

Later, the mother prohibited the girl from using a smartphone and accessing social networks. However, she is not sure if the ban was enough.

Meanwhile, another parent, who introduced himself as ‘having a doctorate and receiving western education’, said there was no need to be embarrassed if children have sex at early age.

“I am sure that the students having sex at early age will still be able to grow up into useful members of society,” he said.

Huong, from the Hanoi University Education, while commenting that ‘it is not terrible for youth to have sexual activities’, affirmed that the activities are prohibited for those under 16, and policymakers have every reason to set the regulation.

“Early sex initiation may raise a lot of sex-related risks to children,” she said, citing a report as saying that there are more than 200,000 adolescent abortion cases each year.

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