Adolescent knowledge about the sexual transmitted infections at the Urban Secondary High School “Martin Klein¨. Varadero. 2005

Abstract

Sexual education is a society's necessity, because its main objectives are qualifying persons in that way that they could fully enjoy the human values in their relation with the other sex and creating optimal spiritual and material conditions to strengthen the most legitimated feelings of love, respect and solidarity on the basis of the full equality that should exist between the parts of a couple; taking this in to account, and also the high incidence of the sexual transmitted infections, the objective of this investigation was to look into the knowledge youngster have about the theme; we also decided to debate the theme with 204 12-to-15 years-old adolescents, in a secondary high school, from January to June 2005. We made a transversal, descriptive, observational study on the adolescents´ knowledge about sexuality and sexual transmitted diseases. We applied a query, showing lack of knowledge on the sexual transmitted diseases by youth, even though all of them declared that they received information on the theme. There was little congruence between the answers of the students that had already practice love and their knowledge on the studied theme. We could appreciate the little use of protection (condom) by students. There was evidence that parent's scholarship as much as their marital status notably influence on their children knowledge about sexual transmitted diseases. They showed school and television as the sources giving them more information on the theme. Their friends and boy (girl) friends' houses are among the most common places where they usually ask for help.