Inter Press Service - December 1, 2004
Marwaan Macan-Markar

The cast was all students from the school -- girls and boys in their early teens -- and the script was the work of the teenagers too. The applause that followed the final act suggested how well the performance had gone down with the children who had filled the hall that had been converted into a makeshift theatre.

Yet the theme of the play was anything but innocent. It was a stark portrayal of a schoolgirl being lured to have sex with a man she did not know. One act revealed her being photographed while in the clutches of the stranger; in another, she was at a doctor's clinic, learning that she has been infected with HIV.

A play with such a theme was a first for this school of some 335 students. And the children who took the lead in producing it felt it was timely. "AIDS is not strange to us. We know what can happen if we end up like that girl in the play," said Nutcharin Inthananchai, the 15-year-old leader of the school's child rights' committee.

Other girls echoed that view, and so, too, did the teachers. The reason behind such bold sentiments - to open the doors of the school to a play that conservatives may view with disdain - is reflected in the profile of the students. There are within the school's population children whose parents have died from AIDS.

What is more, a student from the school died from AIDS two years ago. He was only eight.

But if Thailand's youth are to be saved from the deadly grip of AIDS, schools across the country have to do more than the occasional plays that touch on sex, said activists.

"The education ministry still gives little priority to programmes that matter to deal with HIV," Supecha Baotip, coordinator of the Thai Non-Governmental Organisation (NGO) Coalition on AIDS, told IPS.

"The ministry's officials have a very narrow view about teaching sex in schools," she added. "The way they think about sex is that it is something shameful."

Consequently, Supecha revealed, studies done by NGOs and AIDS activists in schools show that students turn to friends for advice if they have questions about sex while admitting, at the same time, that the first people they trust are their parents and teachers.

Yet Thai schools may not have to remain in a state of denial for long on sex and HIV, the virus that causes the killer disease AIDS. As this South-east Asian country marked World AIDS Day on Dec. 1, education ministry officials were making public plans to introduce a new sex education programme.

Close to 2,000 schools across the country will be roped into this programme due to begin next year, education ministry officials said at a seminar on sex education.

According to the 'Bangkok Post' newspaper, the new initiative stems from the ministry admitting that "teaching sex education as part of the general curriculum (over the past three years had) proved a total failure."

Latest surveys about the spread of HIV in this country illustrate the impact of that failure. "Thai youth do not believe they are at risk of getting infected," declared a nation-wide opinion poll conducted ahead of World AIDS Day by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and the Research Institute of Bangkok University.

"Nearly 80 percent of 15-25 year olds believe they are not at risk of infection," the poll conducted among 7,500 Thai in rural and urban areas revealed. "This explains why only 20 percent of sexually active young people are using condoms consistently."

Young women are the most vulnerable, a survey conducted by the department of disease control states, noting in particular about the high number of teenage girls who were not insisting that their partners use condoms and an equally worrying number who had not consented to their first sexual experience.

Thailand currently has over 600,000 people living with HIV/AIDS, of which over 70,000, according to the ministry of health, are Thai youths between the ages 15 to 24. Nearly 70 percent of the infected youth are women.

In 2003, close to 53,000 people died due to AIDS, pushing the figure of AIDS-related deaths in this country since the killer virus first struck in the mid-1980s to 460,000.

Thailand cannot ignore the country's young girls in its battle against AIDS, Public Health Minister Sudarat Keyuraphan told the media this week. While HIV rates appeared to have dropped among sex workers, there was an increase of the epidemic among school-going teenagers, she said.

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