Conversations about Safe Sex….

I started a lively discussion at lunch yesterday when I was talking about the lectures I attended this weekend at the conference. One of them was HIV/AIDS prevention. The guy who gave the lecture works in Africa with a prevention ministry. He said they use the A B C method to teach about safe sex: Abstinence, Behavior Modification and Condoms. Considering we were sitting in a church, this was somewhat of a bombshell. Although no one got up and left I would not have been surprised if they did. The guy went on to say exactly that, he knew it was a bombshell but he was in the business of protecting people from a deadly disease and protecting women and children in particular (Men in the culture he works in often have multiple partners and bring the disease home to their monogamous wives and thus their children). He said though even as a American, evangelical father, if his daughter has sex with a guy outside of marriage, he will personally give the guy a condom (right before he pulls out his shot gun…). This got the lunch conversation going…

The discussion at lunch centered on rather we should a similar method for teaching teenagers about sex in the public schools. Depending on when you came through or rather you went to a public school or not, you may or may not learned about condom/safe sex at school. I DID. In case you didn’t know those days are mostly over in NC. Abstinence is the only thing presented in NC public schools, I know this with some knowledge because I recently set in on a AIDS educator training session and was told we can’t bring up “Safe Sex” or condoms in less directly asked by a student due to state policy.

We asked more questions than came up with solutions. The big question is do giving kids condoms enable them to have sex. Or will they just do it anyway yet unprotected? We talked a lot about well “I will teach my kids this way…” but the question is not about how you will personally raise your children…what do you do for the kids whose parents never have talk about sex with them or wait too long to have that talk or just aren’t involved enough to care? I have done pelvic exams on young girls who are too young to drive. Some already have STDs…. Bombshell or not, we have a problem.

So I as a future pediatrician should I start passing out condoms to all my adolescent patients even if I would not necessarily do the same for my adolescent child? Is that inconsistent? Will that really solve the problem? Define the problem…is the problem that the kids are having sex or that the kids having unprotected sex? We come back to where we started do condoms enable kids to have more sex?  Do kids make better decisions when we give them choices or when we pretend the choices don’t exist?

Then there is a whole another level of this issue. No matter what we teach in school, what is our culture teaching our kids? Watch nearly any movie over a G rating and you will find sexual tensions and innuendos. How much MTV would you have to watch to find a single safe sex much less abstinence message?  Even the discovery channel has sex documentaries. Its everywhere, its being screamed, whispered, supersized and marketed.  How do we attack this? How do we make sure our kids get any real information? If we teach them about abstinence in school, do we honestly think they don’t know what else is out there? We are kidding ourselves if we do.  We will lose the battle.  Would you rather the media teach your kids? Their School? Their Physician?

Because they will learn about it from someone…

Another speaker I heard this weekend told the story of an African father who kept telling his doc I am going to talk to my son, I am going to talk to my son. Finally he tells the son that they are going to have a father/son talk. They take a walk and the father finally says so, “I wanted to talk to you about sex.” The son grins and says, “Sure Dad, what do you want to know?”

….thoughts?