"Sexual behavior is not only of basic biological
importance, but of central social importance. Not only does it
perpetuate the human species, but it is the central behavior around
which families are formed and defined, a vital aspect of the
psychological well-being of individuals, and a component of a variety of
social problems. Among current concerns tied in part to sexual behavior
are the familial problems of marital harmony and divorce; criminal
problems of rape, incest, child molestation, and prostitution;
reproductive problems of infertility, sterility, unwanted and mistimed
pregnancies, and abortion; and health problems related to sexually
transmitted diseases (STDs).
About 17% of adults 18-59 have had an STD and the lifetime infection
rate is likely to be over 20%. Moreover, with the advent of AIDS the
medical problem of STDs has taken on increasing urgency. Deaths from
AIDS rose at a rapid pace in the 1980s and early 1990s. By 1992 AIDS had
become the number one cause of death among men 25-44. Only recent
improvements in medical treatments have curbed the rising levels of HIV
to AIDS conversions and lowered the death rate from AIDS. Most HIV
infections have resulted from sexual behavior and heterosexual
intercourse is increasingly becoming a mode of transmission
Because of both the importance of sexual behavior in general and the
health crisis of AIDS in particular, we need to arm ourselves with a
thorough, scientifically reliable understanding of sexual behavior and
especially to study high-risk behavior. In this paper we will outline
what is currently known about American sexual behavior." American
Sexual Behavior: Trends, Socio-Demographic Differences, and Risk
Behavior
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abc |
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Pdf 521 kb |
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AIDS and child labour in Zambia |
This rapid
assessment examined correlations between the HIV/Aids pandemic and
child labour in Zambia, and subsequently on the welfare of children
in terms of their health, education, etc. |
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Aids takes its toll in infant mortality |
Hundreds of tiny
coffins bear witness to the extent of fatal disease |
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American Sexual Behavior: Trends, Socio-Demographic Differences, and
Risk Behavior (Large report-increase
download time) |
Sexual behavior
is not only of basic biological importance, but of central social
importance. Not only does it perpetuate the human species, but it is
the central behavior around which families are formed and defined, a
vital aspect of the psychological well-being of individuals, and a
component of a variety of social problems. Among current concerns
tied in part to sexual behavior are the familial problems of marital
harmony and divorce; criminal problems of rape, incest, child
molestation, and prostitution; reproductive problems of infertility,
sterility, unwanted and mistimed pregnancies, and abortion; and
health problems related to sexually transmitted diseases (STDs).
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Assessing Self-Efficacy for HIV Serostatus Disclosure |
Four studies
were conducted to systematically develop scales for assessing
self-efficacy to disclose HIV status to sex partners and negotiate
safer sex practices among men and women living with HIV/AIDS |
Pdf 140 kb |
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Breaking
the silence - Stigma, discrimination and HIV/AIDS |
Hers is not the sort of life anyone would wish on his or her
worst enemy. To describe it as rough would be an
understatement.
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Changing attitudes to sexual morality: a cross-national comparison. |
How many sexual
revolutions can there be, before a certain scepticism arises about
whether the use of 'revolution' is apt? The so-called sexual
revolution that occurred in the 1960s was by no means the first and
doubtless will not be the last. Indeed, the term "sexual revolution"
was coined at least forty years earlier to describe the changing
sexual mores and behaviour of the 1920s and has been used to
describe different periods throughout the intervening years (Martin
1996).(1) The term 'revolution' is charged with meaning and implies
a purposive overthrow of traditional sexual morality. |
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Before
considering the triangular link in its full three-part form, it is
worth mentioning that on occasion during this same period, medical
literature explicitly linked alcoholism and venereal disease without
the nexus of tuberculosis. For example, the 1901 International
Congress on Alcoholism heard a paper in which it was argued that
while alcohol had an undeniable influence on venereal disease by
encouraging sexual excesses, it was “tipsiness” rather than
drunkenness or chronic alcoholism that correlated most closely to
the contraction of venereal infection |
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Dangerous Inhibitions: How America is letting AIDS become An
Epidemic of the Young |
AIDS prevention
efforts are failing America’s young people. New hope in the
treatment of AIDS has overshadowed the fact that the epidemic
continues, and that the rate of AIDS reported among younger
Americans continues to escalate. Today, one-half of all new HIV
infections in the US occur in people under the age of 25.
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155 kb pdf
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Don't
Sell my Body anymore because I can Sell Drugs |
Justine Illiria
was born in Southern Albania in 1975, in a small rural village to a
poor Muslim family. She was one of eight children and from the age
of six she would help in the fields with the tobacco harvest. The
Salamon Foundation is committed to the regeneration of community in
southern Hungary, and has particular regard for the special needs of
women and girl-children who participate in sex work. |
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Education of the children of the positive people is becoming a
problem in Kerala |
. In two cases,
the children are not allowed to continue in the school where there
have been studying, though they are negative. In both places the
decision came from people's committees. This once again proves that
Kerala's high education status has only an instrumental basis, which
is of technical quality that helps to attain jobs. There is no real
quality or value so that the system rejects those who are not fit to
its instrumentality. |
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Further evidence of super-infection found in African sex workers and
Swiss drug injectors |
Although none of
the studies provided any major new insights in addition to the five
published studies that provided the ‘proof of principle’ that
chronic infection with one strain may not provide protection against
challenge from another, they did add something further to the
knowledge-base that might begin to answer the burning question of
how often super-infection occurs and what the clinical relevance of
super-infection might be in people on HAART. |
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Gender Differences in the Timing of First Intercourse: Data from 14
Countries |
Early initiation
of intercourse and the context within which sexual activity begins
are key indicators of adolescents' potential risk for unplanned
pregnancy, abortion and sexually transmitted diseases. Comparative
information on the sexual behavior of male and female adolescents in
different countries assists health planners and service providers in
meeting adolescents' needs. |
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Have you ever wondered how these innocent and uneducated village
belles's land up as commercial sex workers in the cities? |
Often we have
seen in movies and heard that women get sold here in the markets by
men who coax them to come to cities with the greed of marriage or
jobs. |
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High Incidence of Rape Exposes Girls to HIV/AIDS Infection |
Faridah Ssentongo,
10, may remain traumatised for
the rest of her life, right groups fear |
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Human rights abuses & HIV transmission to girls |
After my mother
dies, I went to my mother’s mother. In 2001, she died, so I stopped
school…Then we went to my auntie, my mom’s younger sister…Most girls
find that they start keeping up with (having sex with) stepfathers
or uncles. Most are raped. They have no say. They think if you
bring them to the police, there will be no one to keep me. So they
keep quit. Each year,
children are ushered into roles they’re not supposed to perform;
heading households, unable to attend school, getting pregnant, on
the street, into commercial sex. Living with HIV/AIDS has a huge
impact on the mind of a child. They lose parents very early, and
they’re ushered into these roles
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Pdf 607 kb |
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HUMAN
SEXUALITY: CONDOMS: LIFE SAVERS OR KILLERS? |
In 1987, Surgeon General C. Everett Koop publicly recommended
that people use condoms to prevent the transmission of HIV, which
develops in to AIDS. Some conservative Christian organizations
attacked his stance. Phyllis Schlafly of Eagle Forum accused him
of promoting "safe fornication with condoms" as "a cover-up for the
homosexual community." Conservative anti-tobacco advocate and a
close colleague of Koop defended the Surgeon General. She said:
"I hate to be in a public debate with Phyllis Schlafly, since we have
a lot of things in common. But she is wrong about Dr. Koop....In
everything I've read in Dr. Koop's written speeches, he stresses
monogamy as the first line of defense against AIDS."
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Intelligent and Responsible Sexual Behavior |
This page exists
to promote rational sexual behavior. The need for such behavior is
especially important today with the presence of the HIV virus and
AIDS, which can be fatal. Furthermore, some sexually transmitted
diseases (STD) are incurable (HIV, hepatitis C, and herpes are cases
in point). You get one of those diseases and your life is forever
changed. This page contains info that I would want my children to
know, but it is designed tastefully for young and old alike |
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Lessons
learned in India |
As the modes of
transmission are through blood and sexual intercourse to address the
high-risk groups (sex workers; injecting drug addicts; mobile work
force, such as truck drivers, construction workers etc.) on a war
footing before it percolates to the general public seemed effective.
But we failed
miserably in preparing the ground for intervention |
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Men feel uncomfortable in health settings |
Reproductive and
sexual health services have always focused on women and girls, but
little effort has gone into working with men, especially young men. |
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PIERCING THE VEIL OF SECRECY IN HIV/AIDS AND OTHER
SEXUALLY TRANSMITTED DISEASES: THEORIES OF PRIVACY AND DISCLOSURE IN
PARTNER NOTIFICATION |
At
least since their appearance in Western Europe in the late fifteenth
century, sexually-transmitted diseases (STDs), or "venereal
diseases" as they were once called, have been characterized by a
remarkable paradox. Despite their endemic nature in Europe and North
America, STDs were, and still are, a "secret malady." Persons have
endeavored to keep their sexually-transmitted infections hidden from
the social world -- from their sexual partners, families, and
communities. At the same time, prevailing social mores have kept
STDs from the public consciousness and consequently have prevented
STDs from receiving public action and effective intervention. |
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Potential moral stigma and reactions to sexually transmitted
diseases: Evidence for a disjunction fallacy
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Five experiments
demonstrate how potential moral stigma leads people to underplay
their susceptibility to STDs and dampens their interest in getting
tested. After adding unprotected sex to a list of otherwise
innocuous possible vectors for a disease, we found that infected
people were perceived to be less moral (Experiment 1A), and
individuals believed that if they had the disease, others would see
them as less moral too (Experiment 1B). Adding this stigmatized
vector also reduced reported testing intentions (Experiment 2) and
perceived risk of exposure (Experiment 3) – a disjunction fallacy
because adding a potential cause reduced estimated likelihood,
in violation of basic probability rules. Finally, we replicated the
effect in a computer virus analog (Experiment 4), and showed that it
did not result from simply knowing that one has not engaged in the
stigmatized behavior. Results suggest that avoidance of potential
stigma can have dramatic health consequences. |
Pdf 196 kb |
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Preparing for adulthood: adolescent sexual and reproductive health |
The nature and
experience of adolescence vary tremendously by sex, marital status,
class, region and cultural context. As a group, however,
adolescents are generally recognized to have sexual and reproductive
health needs that differ from those of adults and which are still
poorly understood in much of the world |
494 kb pdf |
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Prevalence of Unsafe Sexual Behavior Among HIV-infected Individuals |
Overall, 12% of
the individuals reported unsafe sex, 81% denied unsafe sex, and the
remaining 7% neither reported nor denied unsafe sex. Of those
individuals who responded, 78% received antiretroviral therapy, and
25% had optimal viral suppression with viral loads of <50 copies/mL
during the preceding 12 months |
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Rapes fuel Bangladesh AIDS crisis |
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REFRAMING WOMEN'S RISK: Social Inequalities and HIV Infection |
Social
inequalities lie at the heart of risk of HIV infection among women
in the United States. As of December, 1995, 71,818 US women had
developed AIDS-defining diagnoses. |
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Risk, Morality, and Blame: A Critical Analysis of Government and
Donor Responses to HIV Infections Among Sex Workers in India |
India is one of five
countries that were classified by the US National Intelligence
Council in 2002 as representing the second wave of the HIV/AIDS
epidemic. Current estimates put the total of those infected with
HIV in India at 4.5 million, with projections for the number of
infections to rise to anywhere between 9 to 25 million by 2010. |
302 kb pdf |
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Sex and HIV: Behaviour-Change
Trial Shows No Link |
A UK funded trial
aimed at reducing the spread of Aids in Uganda by modifying sexual
behaviour appears to have had little discernible effect.
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Sex and youth: contextual factors affecting risk for HIV/AIDS
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This bare summary
of 3 pioneering sets of studies investigations into the determinants
of HIV-related vulnerability cannot convey the extraordinary wealth
of data and the richness of experiences and feeling reported by the
participants with striking frankness. |
314 kb pdf
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Sex for Sale,
Legally |
Though some
governments are still trying to crack down on prostitution, others
are realising that it is better to legalise and license it than to
suffer the ill effects of driving it underground. New Zealand has
just done so; Belgium looks set to be next. |
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Sex Work
in the South |
In recent times,
prompted by the concern over the spread of HIV/AIDS, commercial sex
workers have been the focus of a great deal of attention, primarily
with the aim of promoting safe sex as a method of preventing
disease. Despite the numerous groups active among sex workers, and
despite the government’s professed interest in the matter, there has
been no accurate assessment of the total number of people practising
the profession in India |
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Sex Workers and the Cost of Safe Sex |
There have been few
epidemics in the last century which have affected living standards
as severely in the developing world as the HIV-AIDS crisis…The
epidemic is particularly devastating because it strikes the most
productive members of the population—young adults…Given that the
disease has no effective vaccine or cure, and that sex work plays a
central role in its growth, promoting the use of condoms and other
safe sex practices among sex workers is considered perhaps the most
effective method of preventing the spread of the epidemic |
98 kb pdf |
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Sex Workers Join Efforts to Contain Spread of AIDS |
Commercial sex
workers are not responsible for
the rise in AIDS cases regionally, but their activities do
contribute, and efforts to contain the spread of HIV now include
members of the world's oldest profession |
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Sex
workers problems in Greece |
This law in
Greece it's unconstitutional and can't make things work because you
can't find a place in Athens which is 200 metre [away] from
churches, schools youth centers public squares public buildings etc. |
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Sexual behavior among Vietnamese married women |
While sex is
love, excitement, and joy, in Vietnam existing studies also portray
sexual activity as a source of weakness, fatigue and even an extra
burden for women. They bear high rates of abortion and reproductive
tract infections. |
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Sexual Behavior, HIV & Family Trends |
The USAID-supported
ABC Study examines how prevention behaviors may have affected HIV
prevalence as well as fertility patterns in three countries where
HIV prevalence declined furing the 1990s and in three countries
where it appears not to have declined. |
Pdf 3,541 kb |
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Sexual Experiences and Their Correlates Among College Students
in Mumbai City, India |
Traditional
norms and the role of the family are losing their importance in
governing young people’s sexual behavior in India. School-based
sexuality programs are needed that will provide students with
accurate information about pregnancy, contraception and sexually
transmitted diseases. |
434 kb pdf |
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Sexual Prejudice:
Motivations |
A variety of
motivations underlie sexual prejudice. One way to understand those
motives is to ask how a particular heterosexual's antigay attitudes
benefit her or him psychologically. |
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Sexual risk
behaviours, perceptions and norms among unmarried adolescents:
evidence from case studies |
About
one-fourth of boys in this particular sample had engaged in
risky premarital sex, and their sexual networks included
multiple partners and unsafe sex. They carried misperceptions
about what constituted risky behavious and therefore did not
consider themselves at risk. Although many girls were aware
that some boys had sexual relations with their peers and that
some went to ‘red light areas’ they did not perceive any risk of
contracting HIV from their future partner or spouse. |
29 kb pdf |
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SEXUALITY AS PART OF LIFE IN AN ERA OF
HIV/AIDS |
Every human being is a
primary manifestation of life forces which flow through each and
every one of us as part of that which energizes us. Part
of this life force is sexual energy. It is life enhancing. It is
inherent in all of us from birth. It is also powerful. |
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Sexuality- Study Finds That Teenage Virginity Pledges Are Rarely
Kept |
Among teenagers who pledged not to have sex before marriage,
a majority did not live up to their vows, according to a national study
reported here on Tuesday. The teenagers also developed sexually
transmitted diseases at about the same rate as adolescents who
had not made such pledges.
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Summary of HIV Prevalence and Sexual
Behavior Findings |
This study compares
levels and trends of behavioral indicators such as abstinence and
age of sexual debut among youth, faithfulness in sexual
relationships, multiple sexual partners, and condom use. |
288 kb pdf |
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Survey on STI among female sex workers in 5 border provinces of
Vietnam |
STIs and HIV
among FSWs are important public heath problems
in the border provinces of Vietnam although epidemic patterns appear
different between northern, central and southern regions. |
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Survey Suggests Lack of Awareness
Heightens Risk for Sexually Transmitted Diseases |
New survey results
unveiled today by the American Social Health Association (ASHA) - an
organization dedicated to preventing sexually transmitted diseases
(STDs) -- suggest that lack of awareness may put Americans at risk
for contracting STDs. |
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The Secret War on Condoms
|
Conservative
groups in Pres Bush's support base have launched disinformation
campaign about effectiveness of condoms that, if successful, could
lead to millions of deaths from AIDS around world; says they do not
realize that disparaging condoms is far more likely to discourage
their use than to discourage sex |
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THE WAR AGAINST YOUNG PEOPLES’ SEXUALITY |
It is the thesis of this
essay that young people are far more harmed by misguided attempts at
“protection” than they would be by having full access to honest
information about sexual health and safety.We
need to confront the continuing national panic and convincingly
argue that socially conservative beliefs and policies are largely to
blame for the problems they purport to address. |
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Teenagers traded for slave labour and sex |
Today, a new
international study reveals that Britain has become an easy target
for child trafficking gangs. In a special report, |
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Timing of First Intercourse Among Malian Adolescents: Implications
for Contraceptive Use |
Nearly half of
sexually experienced urban males said they would have preferred to
delay their first intercourse, compared with about one-fifth of
females and of rural males. Males most often said curiosity and peer
pressure (including pressure from their girlfriends) had led them to
begin having sex earlier than they would have liked, while females
in urban areas cited love and those in rural areas cited a promise
of marriage. Focus groups, however, suggested that young urban women
often had sex to obtain cash to meet their material needs and
desires. Unmarried urban females who exhibited high self-esteem and
an internal locus of control were significantly more likely to be
satisfied with the timing of their first sexual encounter; these
factors had no effect among males. Among adolescents who were
satisfied with the timing of their first sexual experience, both
males and females were more likely to have used a modern
contraceptive at first intercourse, and females were more likely to
have ever used a modern method. Multivariate analyses, however,
indicated that a large part of the effect among females was mediated
by psychological factors: High self-esteem and an internal locus of
control were associated with an increased likelihood of having ever
used contraceptives. Among young men, ever-use was strongly
associated with self-esteem and was only weakly associated with the
timing of first intercourse |
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Where
men make a difference |
In all societies,
men are known to engage in high risk activities for acquisition of
HIV....Due to the high risk behaviour of men, their female sexual
partners are at high risk of acquiring HIV infection. HIV is
also more easily transmitted from the male to the female due to
biological reasons |
78 kb pdf |
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Women being cheated into marriage by HIV-positive Men |
A SWAPO
parliamentarian claims that some women are being cheated into
marriage by men who lie about their HIV status. |
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