Report on the Global HIV/AIDS epidemic

Report on the global HIV/AIDS epidemic - June 2000

tice. Because young people are an increasing focus for prevention campaigns, they
are also a focus of this review of how well different strategies are working.
How many young people manage to delay first sex?
Many societies confer on their young people ideals that are not always matched by
reality. Virginity at marriage, especially for women, is an ideal across many continents which AIDS prevention programmes have often espoused. But when young
people are asked about what really goes on in their lives, the gap between the ideal
and the reality can be very wide indeed.
In the high-income countries, the percentage of young people who were no longer
x virgins by the age of 17 started rising gradually in the late 1970s. In Switzerland, for
example, 65% of boys in 1985 had already begun to have sex by age 17, and the
same was true for 58% of girls in 1989. The epidemic and AIDS prevention campaigns, however, began to reverse this trend, and by 1997 the percentage of sexually active 17-year-old boys had fallen to 54%. In the United States, the proportion
of sexually active 15-year-old boys fell from around one-third in 1988 to around onequarter by 1995.
In most Asian countries, including China, sexual activity is reported to start later than
elsewhere. Both men and women generally have their first intercourse after the age
of 20. Studies of 15-19-year-olds who had never been married in Singapore and Sri
Lanka, for example, found less than 2% of boys reporting that they had already had
sex. In the Philippines, 15% of boys of this age said they were no longer virgins. In
all three countries, none of the unmarried teenage girls surveyed reported having
had sex.
In Latin America, sexual activity can start earlier. A large study in Venezuela found
that a quarter of young people had lost their virginity between the ages of 10 and 14,
and in Mexico the proportion of sexually active boys in the same age group was. 17%. In the Caribbean and in much of sub-Saharan Africa, many young people
begin their sex lives at very early ages. Unlike the trend seen elsewhere, girls tend
to become sexually active earlier than boys.
How many stay abstinent before marriage?
Even where the sexual debut is late, marriage tends to come later still. In study after
study, in country after country, higher proportions of men and women in their teens
ar d early 20s are sexually active than are married. In a large survey in the Indian
state of Orissa, a quarter of men in rural areas and around half in the highly mobile
district of Puri reported having had premarital sex. In Viet Nam, a society that mainS.. tains strict social controls and a firm ideal of virginity at marriage, over one-tenth of
7young people surveyed reported that they were having premarital sex, and just over
half of those said they regularly used condoms.

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