InterPress News Service (IPS); Monday, 18 March 1996.
Misha Lobban

Health officials say a look at the transmission rate for STDs prove that young people are ignoring safe sex messages bombarded at them since the first case of AIDs was discovered in the region more than 13 years ago and are having unprotected sex.

The reasons for increased sexual activity are many and varied but its results are worrying. For example, Jamaica, at 1,266 recorded the highest number of syphilis cases in the region in 1994. In that year too the island saw a 1.3 percent increase in the rate of transmission of this disease among children 10 to 14 years old.

In 1994 Surinamese health officials recorded a 279 percent increase in gonorrhoea infection up from an estimated zero percent in 1993.

Throughout the region - in the British Virgin Islands, Antigua- Barbuda, St. Lucia, Belize, the Bahamas, the Turks and Caicos Islands, Bermuda, Trinidad and Tobago and Dominica gonorrhoea and syphilis infection rates among young people are up -- at times as high as 468 percent over previous tallies. And so is the transmission of HIV.

Barbados in the eastern Caribbean is the only island showing no infections of gonorrhoea or syphilis since 1992.

Health officials remain worried that despite every attempt made by schools, the private sector and the government to try to curb the tendency toward unprotected sex, the message has gone largely unheeded.

"Why teenagers continue to have sex with multiple partners without the use of condoms in light of the increasing spread of life- threatening sexually transmitted diseases still baffles us," says Sheryl O'Neil, communications officer at the Caribbean Research Epidemiology Unit (CAREC) in Trinidad and Tobago said.

Culture plays a large role in the decision to have multiple partners and unprotected sex, health officials say.

Boys, who begin sexual activity much younger than the 15 years attributed to girls, tend to have multiple partners because this behaviour is necessary within the Caribbean culture to prove that he has ascended to manhood.

Additionally, some popular myths put young women at increased risk for STDs. In Jamaica for instance, it is widely believed that a man will get rid of his STD if he has sexual relations with a virgin.

Then there is the matter of economics. In societies where unemployment is rampant -- topping 20 percent regionwide -- and where economies are mostly in structural adjustment or just emerging from such activity, young people are turning to prostitution or sex to earn a living.

Poor people regionwide have very little options in life for economic survival, says Dr Tirbani Jagdeo, head of the Caribbean Family Planning Association (CFPA)

Many of the households in the region are run by a single parent -- in Jamaica the figure is 46 percent of all households. The children in these households, both male and female, have to either help finance the household or are sent out early to fend for themselves, Jagdeo says.

Dr Richard Reid is a general practitioner who works with teenagers in some of the rougher innercity communities of Kingston.

"Many young girls from these areas for instance have very little financial support. They live in poverty with a single working mother and many siblings. In their desire to advance socially they are often enticed into unprotected sexual intercourse in exchange for money," Reid said.

Jamaica's 1993 contraceptive prevalence survey showed that 62 percent of girls aged 13 or younger at first intercourse had a partner at least six years older than they were. Less than half or 43 percent of these young women, the report stated, used contraceptive at first intercourse. Twenty-two percent of teenage males used contraceptive at first intercourse.

"These older men desire skin to skin contact during sexual intercourse and so most young girls are coerced into having unprotected sex putting them at a high risk for STD infections," says Reid.

He added that many young girls living in poverty risked STD infections to get pregnant for an older man whom they hope will then support them financially.

"The highest rate of unemployment is among out-of-school adolescents mainly females who are caught up in this cycle. We have found at the CFPA that the more exposed young people are, the more able they are to take up preventative measures. The only solution is for us to give our young people the basic empowerment through education and employment," says Dr. Jagdeo.

But given the economic reality of the Caribbean where states continue to grapple with unemployment, increasing population and high debt-servicing ratios against a background of declining international aid and foreign exchange earnings, indications are that the options for many jobless youths are limited.

However, according to Peter Weller, clinical psychologist at the Ministry of Health's Epidemiology Unit in Jamaica, despite the economic problems young people must recognise that unprotected sex is not a sensible option.

"If the region is to plug the increasing spread of STDs among young people, the approach of all social agencies have to be integrated in order to address and empower the region's youth through education and employment," Weller said.

"But the bottomline, he added, "is that our young people have to choose between life and death." (end/ips/he/ml/da/96)

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