HIV Risk Prevention: Educating Minority Adolescents
Fighting HIV / AIDS involves no less than changing our whole sexual culture." Peter Piot, Executive Director of UNAIDS, feels that what is most vital is that preventive education be stressed into young people's behavior. (UNESCO Courier, October 1999). Around half of all new cases of HIV infection in the whole world involve young people between 15 and 24, and in more and more cases, below age 15. Why is this so? Because everybody knows that it is the age when you begin experimenting with sex and change partners most often which compounds the problem because it multiplies the risk of infection. Studies in Kenya and Zambia show that 23% of the girls between 15 and 19 are HIV-positive compared with only three to four percent of boys. Girls are more vulnerable because of two reasons: the female genitals are more susceptible to infection than those of males (because they have not yet developed) as well as socio-cultural ones (they are most often won by gifts or are the victims of force). They often have as partners adult men who because of their age are more likely to be HIV-positive than boys.
The roots of the problem are most often poverty and male chauvinism. Hence, it is important to educate boys who have to learn that their worth doesn't depend on the number of women they have seduced.
It's been statistically proven that preventive education makes people much more sexually responsible. Youth are more receptive to prevention messages and go on to adopt a more responsible attitude to sexuality than adults.
In countries where there's been a good response to prevention campaign we've seen a very marked drop in the rate of infection among the 15 to 24-year-olds. The rate in Uganda urban areas has dropped 40%. In Zambia it has dropped most markedly among school children.
All this shows that education has an important role to play. While it's true that many children in developing countries don't go to school, the majority pass through school. The opportunity must be grabbed to give them an education about AIDS adapted to their age group, right from the start of primary school. While people feel that this will still encourage children to have sexual relationships, individuals really don't wait for lessons before starting their sexual life.
It has been statistically proven that preventive education makes people much more sexually responsible, namely by having sexual relationships later and using protection. (UNESCO Courier, 1999).
CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK
While the highly industrialized world has successfully stemmed the tide of new HIV / AIDS infection and has sharply reduced the number of AIDS deaths through the use of new and more potent anti-HIV drugs, everywhere else in the world the pandemic is still spreading uncontrolled with the sick being treated poorly or left untreated. This is noticeable in South and East Asia and most specially in sub-Sahara, Africa (UNESCO Courier, 1999).
In the United States, HIV/STD infections are prevalent among the African-Americans, and the Latinas in urban and rural areas specially in districts where the unemployment rate is high and impoverished families cannot send their children to school. Out-of-school youth ages 12-19 are most stricken and while efforts are being heightened and the federal government and other funding organizations are helping out, HIV/STD cases still exist and programs don't seem to work out at all. The following glaring statistics stand out in surveys conducted throughout the United States:
as of June 2000, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that 431,924 individuals are living with HIV infection and AIDS in the United States
There are an estimated 250,000 Americans who are unaware that they are HIV-infected and many of them are young people.
Half of all new HIV infections are thought to occur in young people under 25 years of age.
More than 123,000 young adults in the United States have developed AIDS in their twenties. The delay between HIV-infection and the onset of AIDS means that most of these young people were infected with HIV as teenagers.
Although the total number of youth in the United States who have been infected with HIV is unknown, public health officials believe that 20,000 people between 13 and 24 years of age are infected with HIV every year at the rate of about 2 every hour.
In the United States, more females than males are now being diagnosed with HIV in the 13- to 19-year-old age group.
By 12th grade, 65% of American youth are sexually active and one in five has had four or more sexual partners.
In the United States, 25% of high school students who have had sex said they were under the influence of alcohol and other drugs the last time they had sex.
HIV...
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