">Contracting Hiv | News On Sa Teens' Sex Lives
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Sections News Sports › Weekend Results Business Entertainment Pictures Community News AIDS Lifeline : INQUEST TO BE PUBLIC Should An Inquest Into The Death Of PUDEMO member Sipho Jele Be Held In Public? Home AIDS Lifeline NEWS ON SA TEENS’ SEX LIVES 19 May, 2010 10:00:00 By James Hall Font size: Some pockets of neighbouring South Africa closely mirror the social and medical situation in Swaziland, and it is sometimes useful to read reports on AIDS developments in that country with an eye on similar situations here.
Fascinating data was released this week from a study on the sexual behaviour of teenage boys and girls in South Africa. For advocates of abstinence and safe sex, the report offers grim reading.
It shows that more than one in 10 boys and one in seven girls have had sex by the time they turn 15.
Why that is discouraging has nothing to do with allowing teens to explore their sexuality, or from the standpoint of traditional morality, but strictly from the point of view that less sex means less AIDS.
Sticking to a single partner, putting off sex and using condoms are three of the best ways to avoid HIV infection.
What we learn from the SA survey, which was conducted from interviews with 15 000 households across that large country, is that the message of "self-preservation" is not proving more powerful than teenage sexual urges or the inducements of older, gift-giving partners.
The report was compiled by the Human Sciences Research Council from data collected in 2008 for a national HIV prevalence survey.
Amongst the youngest teens, aging from pre-teen 12 year-olds to the 14-year-old age group, 10.8 % of boys, and 14.5 % of girls, said they had already had sex.
Amongst the South African provinces, the lowest HIV prevalence among all children from birth to 15 is found in the Western Cape, where it is less than 1%.
KwaZulu-Natal has a childhood HIV prevalence rate of 3.4 %, and Mpumalanga has the highest prevalence of SA’s nine provinces, at 4.5 %.
Who do they have sex with?
The "Sugar Daddy" versus "Sugar Mama" syndrome, where teens are seduced by older partners of the opposite sex with gifts of cash and other inducements, shows a strong tendency to victimise girls. The interviewers found that most of the boys surveyed had sexual relations with girls who were their own ages or were aged approximately the same as their boy partners.
For girls it was a different story.
Over 25 % of girls had sexual relations with older male partners. These men were at least five years older than them, and most were older than that. The girls, who made up a quarter of all teenage girls in South Africa, said these sexual encounters were ‘recent.’
"This type of behaviour puts the girls at risk of contracting HIV at an early age because older male part
