As Children's Day approaches, China's first sex education VCD for primary-school students was officially released Thursday.

The publisher, the Electronic Audio and Video Product Publishing House of South China's Hainan Province, said it would soon present two other such VCDs for junior-high and senior-high school students, respectively.

Of the more than 300 million youngsters in China, some 20 million reach the sexual maturity stage each year.

The publisher hopes that the set of VCDs will help adolescents to form healthy ideas on sex, and enhance their self-protection awareness.

Openly disseminating sexual knowledge used to be taboo in China, and this has resulted in some curious youngsters striving to obtain such knowledge in unhealthy ways, including viewing pornographic materials.

(People's Daily May 31, 2002)