People have multiple goals for comprehensive sex education programs, e.g., reducing teen pregnancy, reducing STD, and addressing adolescent questions and concerns about sexuality. This presentation will summarize the effects of 85 studies of sex and STD/HIV education programs around the world. It demonstrates that some programs reduce sexual risk behavior and others do not.
It identifies a few of the characteristics of effective programs, e.g., focusing on specific behaviors; giving a clear message about behaviors; identifying situations that might lead to unwanted and unprotected sex and how to avoid them; addressing perceptions of risk, attitudes about condoms and contraception, perceptions of peer norms, self-efficacy to avoid unprotected sex and to insist on using condoms or other forms of contraception, and intentions; and finally incorporating many interactive experiential activities to change each of these factors.
This presentation will describes a promising intervention that is designed not only to reduce sexual risk behavior, but also to increase the quality of sexual experience – to help young people have the kinds of sexual experience they would like to have and to avoid those they don’t want to have. It is based on a model that will help them
1) identify more clearly what they want to do and not do sexually with different people and in different situations,
2) improve their skills to communicate to their partner what they want to do and not do sexually and
3) improve their skills to please their partner.
Conflict of Interest: None disclosed
Financial Support/Funding: None
Recorded at 19th WAS World Congress for Sexual Health - Sexual Health & Rights: A Global Challenge Göteborg (Sweden) - June 21 – 25, 2009.
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