They don’t get enough information about sex, say young people all over the world. And when it comes to condoms, they don’t always bother. The findings come in a survey of 29 countries published on World Contraception Day.

Sex with a new partner? Of course, you use a condom, don’t you? That’s what all the campaigns have been saying for years. But in practice the figures for the past three years tell a different story.

The number of young people who have unprotected sex with a new partner in Great Britain has risen by 19 percent. In the United States, the figure is up by no less than 39 percent, and in France, a whopping 111 percent. At least, that’s according to a new survey by pharmaceutical giant Bayer, which found that more than a quarter of all women aged between 15 and 24 don’t bother with a condom the first time they have sex with a new partner.

'Live your life'
The survey questioned 6000 people aged between 15 and 24 in 29 different countries. (In Egypt they were all married and aged between 22 and 30.) The results were presented on Monday – World Contraception Day. The day’s motto: “Live your Life. Know your rights. Learn about contraception.”

The International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF) is one of the organisations behind the research. “Millions of women in the world still have no access to contraception, although they would like to,” says IPPF’s Doortje Braeken. “We’ve been trying to help young people avoid unplanned pregnancies and sexually transmitted diseases for a long time.”

Biology
In Europe, only half the young people surveyed said they’d had any sex education. In North and South America, Asia and the Pacific, the figure was 75 percent. But the youngsters often said the information they had received was inadequate. Doortje Braeken agrees with the criticism.

“Many young people get the impression that sex education is just biology. But that’s absolutely not what they want to know. They want to know about relationships, how to talk to each other. About relationships between men and women, about homosexuality. It’s not just about the risks and where your uterus is. It’s more than that,” the IPPF spokeswoman says. And strikingly, many young people said they didn’t trust their teachers when it came to information on sexuality, she adds.

Double Dutch
Doortje Braeken points out that the number of unplanned pregnancies is particularly low in the Netherlands, where since the rise of HIV/AIDS public sexual health information has promoted the so-called ‘double Dutch approach’: the contraceptive pill used together with condoms. But in many countries, condoms are hard to come by, and only married couples have access to contraception, says Henk Rolink of Dutch sexual health and rights organisation Rutgers WPF.

“Sexuality is often a politically loaded subject which governments don’t want to burn their fingers on,” he says. “What’s more, health care budgets are often very low. Family Planning gets a low priority. In many other countries sex education mainly concentrates on abstinence. This is often the case in Western countries too, but of course it doesn’t square with reality. Young people do have sex.”

Seatbelt
Despite the free availability of condoms in many Western countries, young people don’t use them regularly – not even the first time with a new partner, as the survey reveals. In fact, they don’t behave so differently from people in poorer regions of the world.

Have young people – particularly in developed countries – become blasé? “Of course we’re suffering a bit from AIDS and STD fatigue,” says Doortje Braeken. “The topic has received a lot of attention, and now it’s decreased. But it’s something you constantly need to keep drawing attention to. Using a condom should be just as normal as wearing a seatbelt or brushing your teeth.”