InterPress News Service (IPS) - Wednesday, October 7, 1998

"We must put an end to the vision of youth as mere objects of intervention," Peter Piot, director of the joint UN Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS), said here during the last round of meetings for 1998 of the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child, which ends this week.

Children and teenagers have to participate actively in the assessment of issues that affect them, said the Committee's president, Sandra Mason.

The Committee analysed the problems of children living in a world with the Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS) under the premise that the needs of minors are not being addressed with the same urgency as those of adults. However, campaigns over the past two years have created an awareness that children and teens are under threat from the Human Immuno-Deficiency Virus (HIV), which causes to AIDS, and which, Piot said, was passed on to more than 500,000 infants last year by their mothers.

An average of 7,000 youths under the age of 25 contract the virus worldwide each day. Around half of the new cases of HIV - or 2.6 million new cases a year - occur among 10 to 25-year-olds. That means millions of HIV-positive children and teenagers requiring medical attention and protection from discrimination, Piot said.

At the same time, young people possess an enormous capacity to change the course of the epidemic, and "constitute a powerful force for change in their families, among their peers and in the community," he argued.

UNAIDS has found spectacular evidence of the effectiveness of AIDS-prevention efforts among and by the young.

In Uganda, from 1990 to 1996, the number of new HIV cases shrank by 40 percent among urban teenage girls due to more responsible health behaviour, while a campaign among young men in Thailand showed similar results.

Rarely have such successes been chalked up among older people, which provides a lesson for those who treat teenagers as irresponsible children, and adolescence as a socio-pathological state, said Piot.

Teenagers have proven to be effective educators of their peers, as demonstrated by the work of the Mathare Youth Sports Association (MYSA) in Nairobi, which trained its football players to spread information on HIV among other youngsters.

The athletes insisted on sexual abstinence, while stressing the use of condoms by youths who do engage in sex as well as faithfulness to a single partner. Issues the MYSA educators discussed with their peers included heterosexual relationships among young people, young men whose self-esteem is based on sexual conquests, and young women whose identities revolve around finding a male partner.

School should impart education based on life experiences, said Piot. Young people can grow through communication on sexual matters and a healthy lifestyle. But efforts to provide teaching based on life experiences are frequently grounded by resistance from those who argue that sex education encourages promiscuity, "but that is a myth that needs to be debunked," Piot argued.

UNAIDS studies demonstrate that when youngsters receive education based on experience, the incidence of sexually transmitted diseases and the number of teen pregnancies drop, while the age of initiation into sex rises.

In most countries, health services are not very teen-friendly. Adolescents are frequently criticised by medical personnel for having sexual relations at a young age.

On the other hand, incorporating young people into health services provides excellent results, as demonstrated by an experiment in Lusaka, where a non-governmental organisation teamed up with the Ministry of Health and the UN Children's Fund (UNICEF) to provide care for adolescents.

To check the AIDS epidemic, methods "whose effectiveness we already know must be used, even if that means taking tough, unpopular decisions," Piot argued. "Failure to do so would be unacceptable." (END/IPS/tra-so/pc/mj/sw/98)
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