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Marina Lacroix

WHO | Topic: adolescent/young people - 0 views

www.who.int/...index.html

WHO statistics adolescent youth sexual health reproductive health HIV_AIDS

shared by Marina Lacroix on 11 Mar 09 - Cached
  • Marina Lacroix on 11 Mar 09
     
    adolescence
Marina Lacroix

Newt Gingrich: Let's End Adolescence - BusinessWeek - 0 views

www.businessweek.com/...b4107085289974.htm

youth youth participation

shared by Marina Lacroix on 15 Nov 08 - Cached
  • The fact is, most young people want to be challenged and given real responsibility. They want to be treated like young men and women, not old children.
  • In the U.S., this principle of direct transition from the world of childhood play to the world of adult work was clearly established at the time of the Revolutionary War. Benjamin Franklin was an example of this kind of young adulthood. At age 13, Franklin finished school in Boston, was apprenticed to his brother, a printer and publisher, and moved immediately into adulthood. John Quincy Adams attended Leiden University in Holland at 13 and at 14 was employed as secretary and interpreter by the American Ambassador to Russia. At 16 he was secretary to the U.S. delegation during the negotiations with Britain that ended the Revolution. Daniel Boone got his first rifle at 12, was an expert hunter at 13, and at 15 made a yearlong trek through the wilderness to begin his career as America's most famous explorer. The list goes on and on.
    • Marina Lacroix
      Marina Lacroix on 15 Nov 08
       
      Proof that young adults/adolescents can carry responsibility and function like adults.
  • We have to end adolescence as a social experiment. We tried it. It failed. It's time to move on. Returning to an earlier, more successful model of children rapidly assuming the roles and responsibilities of adults would yield enormous benefit to society.
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  • Prior to the 19th century, it's fair to say that adolescence did not exist. Instead, there was virtually universal acceptance that puberty marked the transition from childhood to young adulthood.
  • For the poor who most need to make money, learn seriously, and accumulate resources, adolescence has helped crush their future. By trapping poor people in bad schools, with no work opportunities and no culture of responsibility, we have left them in poverty, in gangs, in drugs, and in irresponsible sexual activity. As a result, we have ruined several generations of poor people who might have made it if we had provided a different model of being young.
Marina Lacroix

Addressing Cultural Sensitivities - 0 views

www.pathfind.org/...nov_2000.htm

youth reproductive health reproductive rights obstacles youth participation

shared by Marina Lacroix on 28 Jan 09 - Cached
  • common concern among adults that adolescent reproductive health programs will encourage adolescent sexual activity
  • Young people have traditionally learned about sex and reproduction through the extended family or via a network of neighbors or friends, often in conjunction with well-defined rituals or rites of passage. Sex education in the schools can be perceived as a challenge to these more traditional routes. Furthermore, most societies do not grant adolescents full legal, economic, and social rights. Adult control over young people’s access to health education and services, including contraception, is seen as natural.
  • politicians and government officials often enact laws and formal policies that limit their access to reproductive health care. Such regulations usually require a minimum age, parental consent, or that a person be married to receive the service
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  • Even where no formal restrictions exist, many health workers refuse or are reluctant to provide unmarried or childless young people—especially young women—with contraceptives. Teachers and other professionals who interact with youth share similar biases
  • Religious groups, for example, have strongly opposed school-based sexuality education in the United States, Mexico, and Kenya
  • Involve youth. Young people are among the most effective advocates for change, and several programs have channeled their energy and enthusiasm into helping modify social norms and lower barriers to youth programming. Members of the Youth Advocacy Movement of the Bahamas Family Planning Association produced a "photojournal" depicting issues of importance to youth. They presented these to Ministry of Health officials to highlight youth concerns as part of a broader campaign to advocate for greater attention to youth health.54 In the Dominican Republic, advocacy by youth, including visits to legislators, a letter-writing campaign to local and national government officials, and rallies and other events were key to the recent passage of a national youth law.55 In Brazil, community members initially ridiculed girls trained to speak to other youth on HIV/AIDS and sexuality. As the value of their work became apparent, the girls gained the respect of the community and changed beliefs about the proper role of young women in openly discussing sex.56
Marina Lacroix

Impact of Sex and HIV Education Programs on Sexual Behaviors of Youth in Developing and... - 0 views

www.fhi.org/...sexedworkingpaperfinalenyt.pdf

sex education effectiveness research

shared by Marina Lacroix on 13 Mar 09 - No Cached
  • Marina Lacroix on 13 Mar 09
     
    Impact of Sex and HIV Education Programs on Sexual Behaviors of Youth in Developing and Developed Countries (2005, Youth Research Working Paper Series) Sex and HIV education programs that are based on a written curriculum and that are implemented among groups of youth in school, clinic, or community settings are a promising type of intervention to reduce adolescent sexual risk behaviors. This paper summarizes a review of 83 evaluations of such programs in developing and developed countries. The programs typically focused on pregnancy or HIV/STI prevention behaviors, not on broader issues of sexuality such as developmental stages, gender roles, or romantic relationships. The review analyzed the impact programs had on sexual risk-taking behaviors among young people. It addressed two primary research questions: 1) What are the effects, if any, of curriculum-based sex and HIV education programs on sexual risk behaviors, STI and pregnancy rates, and mediating factors such as knowledge and attitudes that affect those behaviors? 2) What are the common characteristics of the curricula-based programs that were effective in changing sexual risk behaviors?
Marina Lacroix

Youth reproductive and sexual health - USAIDS 2008 report - 0 views

www.measuredhs.com/...CR19.pdf

youth sexual behaviour contraception HIV_AIDS teen pregnancy abortion abstinence

shared by Marina Lacroix on 11 Mar 09 - No Cached
  • Marina Lacroix on 11 Mar 09
     
    The study provides information on key reproductive and sexual health indicators in young women and men age 15-24 in 38 developing countries. The data come from Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) and AIDS Indicator Surveys (AIS) conducted between 2001 and 2005. Indicators are selected for the following key areas: background characteristics; adolescent pregnancy; contraception; sexual activity; and HIV/AIDS-related knowledge, attitudes, and behaviors. Additional analysis examines the association of various individual and household characteristics with the key indicators.
Marina Lacroix

Dept. of Disputation: Red Sex, Blue Sex: Reporting & Essays: The New Yorker - 0 views

www.newyorker.com/...081103fa_fact_talbot

abstinence sex education US youth sexual behaviour teen pregnancy

shared by Marina Lacroix on 17 Nov 08 - Cached
  • Social liberals in the country’s “blue states” tend to support sex education and are not particularly troubled by the idea that many teen-agers have sex before marriage, but would regard a teen-age daughter’s pregnancy as devastating news. And the social conservatives in “red states” generally advocate abstinence-only education and denounce sex before marriage, but are relatively unruffled if a teen-ager becomes pregnant, as long as she doesn’t choose to have an abortion.
  • Regnerus argues that religion is a good indicator of attitudes toward sex, but a poor one of sexual behavior, and that this gap is especially wide among teen-agers who identify themselves as evangelical. The vast majority of white evangelical adolescents—seventy-four per cent—say that they believe in abstaining from sex before marriage. (Only half of mainline Protestants, and a quarter of Jews, say that they believe in abstinence.) Moreover, among the major religious groups, evangelical virgins are the least likely to anticipate that sex will be pleasurable, and the most likely to believe that having sex will cause their partners to lose respect for them. (Jews most often cite pleasure as a reason to have sex, and say that an unplanned pregnancy would be an embarrassment.) But, according to Add Health data, evangelical teen-agers are more sexually active than Mormons, mainline Protestants, and Jews. On average, white evangelical Protestants make their “sexual début”—to use the festive term of social-science researchers—shortly after turning sixteen. Among major religious groups, only black Protestants begin having sex earlier.
  • In 2004, the states with the highest divorce rates were Nevada, Arkansas, Wyoming, Idaho, and West Virginia (all red states in the 2004 election); those with the lowest were Illinois, Massachusetts, Iowa, Minnesota, and New Jersey. The highest teen-pregnancy rates were in Nevada, Arizona, Mississippi, New Mexico, and Texas (all red); the lowest were in North Dakota, Vermont, New Hampshire, Minnesota, and Maine (blue except for North Dakota). “The ‘blue states’ of the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic have lower teen birthrates, higher use of abortion, and lower percentages of teen births within marriage,” Cahn and Carbone observe. They also note that people start families earlier in red states—in part because they are more inclined to deal with an unplanned pregnancy by marrying rather than by seeking an abortion.
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  • This could be because evangelicals are also among the most likely to believe that using contraception will send the message that they are looking for sex. It could also be because many evangelicals are steeped in the abstinence movement’s warnings that condoms won’t actually protect them from pregnancy or venereal disease. More provocatively, Regnerus found that only half of sexually active teen-agers who say that they seek guidance from God or the Scriptures when making a tough decision report using contraception every time. By contrast, sixty-nine per cent of sexually active youth who say that they most often follow the counsel of a parent or another trusted adult consistently use protection.
  • Nationwide, according to a 2001 estimate, some two and a half million people have taken a pledge to remain celibate until marriage.
  • More than half of those who take such pledges—which, unlike abstinence-only classes in public schools, are explicitly Christian—end up having sex before marriage, and not usually with their future spouse.
  • pledgers delay sex eighteen months longer than non-pledgers, and have fewer partners. Yet, according to the sociologists Peter Bearman, of Columbia University, and Hannah Brückner, of Yale, communities with high rates of pledging also have high rates of S.T.D.s.
  • Bearman and Brückner have also identified a peculiar dilemma: in some schools, if too many teens pledge, the effort basically collapses. Pledgers apparently gather strength from the sense that they are an embattled minority; once their numbers exceed thirty per cent, and proclaimed chastity becomes the norm, that special identity is lost.
  • Even more important than religious conviction, Regnerus argues, is how “embedded” a teen-ager is in a network of friends, family, and institutions that reinforce his or her goal of delaying sex, and that offer a plausible alternative to America’s sexed-up consumer culture.
  • Teen-agers who live with both biological parents are more likely to be virgins than those who do not. And adolescents who say that their families understand them, pay attention to their concerns, and have fun with them are more likely to delay intercourse, regardless of religiosity.
  • Another key difference in behavior, Regnerus reports, is that evangelical Protestant teen-agers are significantly less likely than other groups to use contraception.
  • The five states with the lowest median age at marriage are Utah, Oklahoma, Idaho, Arkansas, and Kentucky, all red states, while those with the highest are all blue: Massachusetts, New York, Rhode Island, Connecticut, and New Jersey. The red-state model puts couples at greater risk for divorce; women who marry before their mid-twenties are significantly more likely to divorce than those who marry later. And younger couples are more likely to be contending with two of the biggest stressors on a marriage: financial struggles and the birth of a baby before, or soon after, the wedding.
  • Some of these differences in sexual behavior come down to class and education. Regnerus and Carbone and Cahn all see a new and distinct “middle-class morality” taking shape among economically and socially advantaged families who are not social conservatives.
  • In Regnerus’s survey, the teen-agers who espouse this new morality are tolerant of premarital sex (and of contraception and abortion) but are themselves cautious about pursuing it.
  • Because these teen-agers see abstinence as unrealistic, they are not opposed in principle to sex before marriage—just careful about it.
  • Each of these models of sexual behavior has drawbacks—in the blue-state scheme, people may postpone child-bearing to the point where infertility becomes an issue.
  • But Carbone and Cahn argue that the red-state model is clearly failing on its own terms—producing high rates of teen pregnancy, divorce, sexually transmitted disease, and other dysfunctional outcomes that social conservatives say they abhor
  • Evangelicals could start, perhaps, by trying to untangle the contradictory portrayals of sex that they offer to teen-agers. In the Shelby Knox documentary, a youth pastor, addressing an assembly of teens, defines intercourse as “what two dogs do out on the street corner—they just bump and grind awhile, boom boom boom.” Yet a typical evangelical text aimed at young people, “Every Young Woman’s Battle,” by Shannon Ethridge and Stephen Arterburn, portrays sex between two virgins as an ethereal communion of innocent souls: “physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual pleasure beyond description.”
  • A new “abstinence-plus” curriculum, now growing in popularity, urges abstinence while providing accurate information about contraception and reproduction for those who have sex anyway.
  • It might help, too, not to present virginity as the cornerstone of a virtuous life. In certain evangelical circles, the concept is so emphasized that a girl who regrets having been sexually active is encouraged to declare herself a “secondary” or “born-again” virgin. That’s not an idea, surely, that helps teen-agers postpone sex or have it responsibly.
Marina Lacroix

The Atlantic Online | November 2008 | A Boy's Life | Hanna Rosin - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...transgender-children

transgender transsexuality gender

shared by Marina Lacroix on 29 Oct 08 - Cached
  • “If a 5-year-old black kid came into the clinic and said he wanted to be white, would we endorse that?” he told me. “I don’t think so. What we would want to do is say, ‘What’s going on with this kid that’s making him feel that it would be better to be white?’”
    • Marina Lacroix
      Marina Lacroix on 29 Oct 08
       
      The other side of the debate: don't change the biology, adapt the psychology.
  • Zucker says that in 25 years, not one of the patients who started seeing him by age 6 has switched gender. Adolescents are more fixed in their identity. If a parent brings in, say, a 13-year-old who has never been treated and who has severe gender dysphoria, Zucker will generally recommend hormonal treatment. But he considers that a fraught choice. “One has to think about the long-term developmental path. This kid will go through lifelong hormonal treatment to approximate the phenotype of a male and may require some kind of surgery and then will have to deal with the fact that he doesn’t have a phallus; it’s a tough road, with a lot of pain involved.”
  • When they reversed course, they dedicated themselves to the project with a thoroughness most parents would find exhausting and off-putting. They boxed up all of John’s girl-toys and videos and replaced them with neutral ones. Whenever John cried for his girl-toys, they would ask him, “Do you think playing with those would make you feel better about being a boy?” and then would distract him with an offer to ride bikes or take a walk. They turned their house into a 1950s kitchen-sink drama, intended to inculcate respect for patriarchy, in the crudest and simplest terms: “Boys don’t wear pink, they wear blue,” they would tell him, or “Daddy is smarter than Mommy—ask him.” If John called for Mommy in the middle of the night, Daddy went, every time. When I visited the family, John was lazing around with his older brother, idly watching TV and playing video games, dressed in a polo shirt and Abercrombie & Fitch shorts. He said he was glad he’d been through the therapy, “because it made me feel happy,” but that’s about all he would say
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  • Catherine Tuerk, who runs the support group for parents in Washington, D.C., started out as an advocate for gay rights after her son came out, in his 20s. She has a theory about why some parents have become so comfortable with the transgender label: “Parents have told me it’s almost easier to tell others, ‘My kid was born in the wrong body,’ rather than explaining that he might be gay, which is in the back of everyone’s mind. When people think about being gay, they think about sex—and thinking about sex and kids is taboo.”
  • A 2008 study of 25 girls who had been seen in Zucker’s clinic showed positive results; 22 were no longer gender-dysphoric, meaning they were comfortable living as girls. But that doesn’t mean they were happy. I spoke to the mother of one Zucker patient in her late 20s, who said her daughter was repulsed by the thought of a sex change but was still suffering—she’d become an alcoholic, and was cutting herself.
  • A recent medical innovation holds out the promise that this might be the first generation of transsexuals who can live inconspicuously. About three years ago, physicians in the U.S. started treating transgender children with puberty blockers, drugs originally intended to halt precocious puberty. The blockers put teens in a state of suspended development.
  • Around the world, clinics that specialize in gender-identity disorder in children report an explosion in referrals over the past few years. Dr. Kenneth Zucker, who runs the most comprehensive gender-identity clinic for youth in Toronto, has seen his waiting list quadruple in the past four years, to about 80 kids—an increase he attributes to media coverage and the proliferation of new sites on the Internet.
  • Dr. Peggy Cohen-Kettenis, who runs the main clinic in the Netherlands, has seen the average age of her patients plummet since 2002. “We used to get calls mostly from parents who were concerned about their children being gay,” says Catherine Tuerk, who since 1998 has run a support network for parents of children with gender-variant behavior, out of Children’s National Medical Center in Washington, D.C. “Now about 90 percent of our calls are from parents with some concern that their child may be transgender.”
  • The point was to take the situation out of the realm of deep pathology or mental illness, while at the same time separating it from voluntary behavior, and to put it into the idiom of garden-variety “challenge.”
  • Diagnoses of gender-identity disorder among adults have tripled in Western countries since the 1960s; for men, the estimates now range from one in 7,400 to one in 42,000 (for women, the frequency of diagnosis is lower). Since 1952, when Army veteran George Jorgensen’s sex-change operation hit the front page of the New York Daily News, national resistance has softened a bit, too. Former NASCAR driver J.T. Hayes recently talked to Newsweek about having had a sex-change operation. Women’s colleges have had to adjust to the presence of “trans-men,” and the president-elect of the Gay and Lesbian Medical Association is a trans-woman and a successful cardiologist.
  • “Yeah, it is fixable,” piped up another mom, who’d been on the 20/20 special. “We call it the disorder we cured with a skirt.”
  • The problem with blockers is that parents have to begin making medical decisions for their children when the children are quite young. From the earliest signs of puberty, doctors have about 18 months to start the blockers for ideal results. For girls, that’s usually between ages 10 and 12; for boys, between 12 and 14.
  • Blockers are entirely reversible; should a child change his or her mind about becoming the other gender, a doctor can stop the drugs and normal puberty will begin. The Dutch clinic has given them to about 70 children since it started the treatment, in 2000; clinics in the United States and Canada have given them to dozens more. According to Dr. Peggy Cohen-Kettenis, the psychologist who heads the Dutch clinic, no case of a child stopping the blockers and changing course has yet been reported.
  • This suggests one of two things: either the screening is excellent, or once a child begins, he or she is set firmly on the path to medical intervention. “Adolescents may consider this step a guarantee of sex reassignment,” wrote Cohen-Kettenis, “and it could make them therefore less rather than more inclined to engage in introspection.” In the Netherlands, clinicians try to guard against this with an extensive diagnostic protocol, including testing and many sessions “to confirm that the desire for treatment is very persistent,” before starting the blockers.
  • The most extensive study on transgender boys was published in 1987 as The “Sissy Boy Syndrome” and the Development of Homosexuality. For 15 years, Dr. Richard Green followed 44 boys who exhibited extreme feminine behaviors, and a control group of boys who did not.
  • Green expected most of the boys in the study to end up as transsexuals, but nothing like that happened. Three-fourths of the 44 boys turned out to be gay or bisexual (Green says a few more have since contacted him and told him they too were gay). Only one became a transsexual. “We can’t tell a pre-gay from a pre-transsexual at 8,” says Green, who recently retired from running the adult gender-identity clinic in England. “Are you helping or hurting a kid by allowing them to live as the other gender?
  • In 2012, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders—the bible for psychiatric professionals—will be updated. Many in the transgender community see this as their opportunity to remove gender-identity disorder from the book, much the same way homosexuality was delisted in 1973.
  • Zucker has compared young children who believe they are meant to live as the other sex to people who want to amputate healthy limbs, or who believe they are cats, or those with something called ethnic-identity disorder
  • Marina Lacroix on 29 Oct 08
     
    Account of the life of a transgender boy and the history of thinking about transsexuality
Marina Lacroix

FHI - Chapter 2: Barriers to Reproductive Health Care - 0 views

www.fhi.org/...Chapter2.htm

youth reproductive health obstacles

shared by Marina Lacroix on 28 Jan 09 - Cached
  • Adolescents' reproductive health needs are immense, but so are the obstacles young people face in trying to maintain good reproductive health. Lack of knowledge, information and services all create barriers
Marina Lacroix

BBC NEWS | Health | TV shows link to teen pregnancies - 0 views

news.bbc.co.uk/...7707664.stm

sex education teen pregnancy US

shared by Marina Lacroix on 04 Nov 08 - Cached
  • Teenage girls who watch a lot of TV shows with a high sexual content are twice as likely to become pregnant, according to a study.
  • Boys watching similar programmes, like Friends and Sex and the City, were also more likely to get a girl pregnant, the research in Pediatrics found.
  • Study author Dr Anita Chandra of the RAND Corporation
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • The researchers interviewed 2,000 adolescents aged 12 to 17 three times between 2001 and 2004.
Marina Lacroix

New York People - Teens' Sexual Rights - page 1 - 0 views

www.villagevoice.com/...teens-sexual-rights

sex education teen youth

shared by Marina Lacroix on 09 Apr 09 - Cached
  • Mentioning teens and sex in the same sentence, if you're not condemning them, often has negative consequences. Judith Levine, whose book Harmful to Minors (University of Minnesota Press, 2002) argued that children and teens can enjoy sexual pleasure safely, received death threats, and Surgeon General Joycelyn Elders was let go in 1994 after she advocated that masturbation be taught in schools.
  • "Kids aren't getting comprehensive sex education that covers everything, including abstinence, safer sex, and sexual orientation. Most curricula don't acknowledge that kids want to have sex or address those desires reasonably and logically. Libraries have filters on Internet sites, so kids can't get into basic teen education sites."
  • "The adolescents I work with are full of myths about sex. I've heard everything from 'birth control makes you sterile' to 'you can't get pregnant if you have sex right before or after your period' to 'condoms don't protect you from HIV and other STDs.' "
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  • Both pin the blame on Section 510 of Title V of the Social Security Act, enacted under Clinton, which "has as its exclusive purpose, teaching the social, psychological, and health gains to be realized by abstaining from sexual activity." The law requires any school accepting Title V funding to solely offer abstinence-only sex education, without exploring or acknowledging other alternatives or birth control. Since Friedrichs and McNamara work within programs that are privately funded, they can teach classes that go beyond STD prevention.
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