Thursday, June 04, 2009

Sex Ed: A Guardian Reader Tells it Like it Is

Aids: will our children die of ignorance? | Rowenna Davis | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk

A Commentator:

Absolute bollocks. I've been involved in social ed. programmes with secondary school pupils, for 30 odd years. We've been running sex education classes for all that time and AIDS prevention has been a key topic since the disease first made itself felt back in the late 80s/early 90s.

The fact that quite a lot of 'err yoof' appear not to have a clue about what's going on and act in an unsafe way is not due to lack of information or good sex ed. courses but to many of 'err yoof's' unwillingness to pay any attention to what's going on round about them or to control their own behaviour.

As the old saying goes, 'You can take a horse to water but you cannot make it drink.'


I have to say I agree. Educators and government, and countless Third Sector employees, have done their best. But still teenagers fuck around without condoms.

We need a better approach.

1. Decrease stigma. (Hi. I'm Paul. I Have HIV. I can't infect you unless you really take no care about yourself.)

2. Increase medication. Every indication is that HIV+ people are less infective (in fact almost non-infective) if stable on medications, with no viral load, and no other STI's.

3. Stop getting too upset that young people think they will live forever. That's just one of those things we have to deal with.

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