Red Cross Blogs

Let’s talk about sex…

By Anna Carter
September 10, 2009 at 4:59 pm

Perhaps not everyone’s idea of a pleasant conversation. Throw in a little chat about injecting drug users and a few afterthoughts on childbirth and I don’t know many people who would be happy to engage in that particular dialogue. But this is the proposal that I am making to schools in my area. And it would appear that many schools would like their students to join the debate.

The ABC (Awareness, Be safe, Condoms) campaign was initiated by young peer educators in the UK who decided that they did not have access to information concerning HIV and AIDS in the UK and challenged the British Red Cross to do something about that. So we did…with a little help from the young people themselves.

In our area, we run the ABC campaign in two ways: we reach vulnerable groups through peer education projects, and we run sessions for more diverse groups of young people in schools. This is because when it comes to HIV, all young people are considered to be vulnerable. With half of all new infections globally occurring in young people aged 15-24 years old last year; this is a conversation that young people need to be involved in.

These are invaluable initiatives where our peer educators are trained to deliver information about HIV transmission to other young people. Our peer educators are very used to talking to their peers about first aid, but standing up in front of your peers and talking about HIV – particularly given that the topic of sex is implicit within any competent discussion about HIV – can be a very daunting experience.

When working in schools, I always invite the young people to ask me questions about HIV, and given my experiences prior to my Red Cross life in this field, I do assure them that I am relatively un-shockable. This allows young people to ask the questions that they may be too embarrassed to ask a teacher, and I have to say I have heard many, many interesting questions over the years. Our peer educators see the value in this honest and open approach to dealing with HIV and, with great courage, ask for the onslaught of questions in their sessions.

My golden rule? There is no such thing as a stupid question, but there is such a thing as a dangerous answer. If you don’t have the answer, be honest about it. There are many rumours and myths that float around the topic of HIV. Admit that you don’t know, that it is okay not to know. No one has all the answers when it comes to HIV; if anyone did, it would not be such a global problem.

In all the schools that I have worked in over the last year, not one has shied away from talking about the more ‘difficult’ peripheral subjects around HIV, namely sex and drug use. In order to allow young people to make informed and empowered decisions about their body, they need to be given all of the facts, no matter how daunting the prospect of delivering them may be.

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Tags: ABC, hampshire, HIV, isle of wight, red cross, schools, surrey, young people, youth groups

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This entry was posted on Thursday, September 10th, 2009 at 4:59 pm and is filed under Health and social care. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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