Choice for youth and sexuality

Now a new book on this not-so-new subject is drawing fire in some quarters for its conclusion: That hookups can be damaging to young women, denying their emotional needs, putting them at risk of depression and even sexually transmitted disease, and making them ill-equipped for real relationships later on.

Laura Sessions Stepp, author of "Unhooked" and a writer for The Washington Post

"I argue that we shouldn't look at this from a moralistic viewpoint — as in, our youth is in decline — and we shouldn't celebrate it either, in a 'Sex in the City' light," says Bogle, who hasn't read Stepp's book. She also believes that it's wrong to assume women aren't hoping for something more from their hookups. "It's a system for finding relationships — and there isn't really an alternate system," says Bogle. "It feels like it's the only game in town, and if you don't do it, you're left out." She did find that after college, there was a transition back to traditional dating.

Unlike in more developed countries, sex education is not part of the school curriculum in India. In fact, as of late 2007, 12 out of India’s 29 state governments had banned sex education claiming the course material led to sexual experimentation among students and was against the Indian culture.

The number of women raped every day has risen to 53 – a nearly 700 percent increase since 1971. India ranked fifth out of 84 countries studied by the UN Office on Drugs and Crime in 2006, with 19,000 reported rapes per year.

Some women’s groups in India say that fewer than 2 percent of women who have been sexually assaulted in India actually come forward to report the crime, largely because this could undermine a woman’s chances at marriage.

In sub-Saharan Africa, 90–95 percent of HIV infections are transmitted through heterosexual sex. As a result, encouraging changes in heterosexual behavior is a large part of the HIV prevention effort in that region. However, research has shown that, on average, Africans have not changed their sexual behavior very much in response to HIV. This is particularly surprising in light of large changes in behavior among another high-risk group—gay men in the United States.

results suggest a strong correlation between income, life expectancy, and behavior change. Individuals with higher income and longer expected future life span are more likely to respond to HIV risk by lowering their number of sexual partners.

interventions designed to decrease mortality risks, such as malaria, could have significant effects on HIV prevention.

The Ladder of Participation is a model for thinking about youth participation developed by Roger Hart. The bottom three rungs describe youth involvement that is not true participation whereas the top five rungs describe true participation.

shared decisions

Youth-initiated and directed

The first major challenge is that the HIV/AIDS pandemic is still a formidable foe

The second challenge is that the future of the global response against HIV/AIDS today rest on four intricately linked shaky foundations:

lack of capacity to prevent HIV transmission at individual levels, and, the lack of capacity to mobilize care and support at family and community levels.

Hetherington and his companion were among several people surprised by the strength of positive reaction after starting Web sites geared toward a demonstration planned for Wednesday, "Day Without a Gay." Its organizers are asking gay rights supporters to avoid going to work by "calling in gay" and volunteering in the movement instead.

an implicit rejection of the measured approach of established gay rights groups, a course that, some gay men and lesbians maintain, allowed passage of the ban, Proposition 8.

Equality California, announced that it would add several new board members to reflect a surge in interest. The group has also added two "faith leaders," reflecting the opinion of many critics that the campaign should have courted the religious vote.

En juist in deze leeftijdsfase, tussen 16 en 22 jaar, krijgen ze te maken met relaties, seksualiteit en huwelijksdwang. Velen voelen een spagaat tussen de westerse wereld en de cultuur van hun ouders.

Van de 38 casussen gaat het om onder meer Turkse (13), Marokkaanse (8) en Pakistaanse (5) families. In 28 verhalen gaat het om een heimelijke of niet-geaccepteerde vriend, bij 15 leerlingen om uithuwelijken. In 10 gevallen werden leerlingen concreet bedreigd, 15 deelnemers kregen te maken met psychisch geweld, vaak van familieleden. Bij 8 jongeren liep het zo uit de hand dat de leerling elders moest gaan wonen.

Veel hiv-geïnfecteerden krijgen negatieve reacties op hun ziekte. Dat blijkt uit een onderzoek onder 650 mensen met hiv

Familie en vrienden houden in ruim eenderde van de gevallen de geïnfecteerde op afstand of geven hem of haar de schuld van de besmetting. Ruim de helft van de ondervraagden kreeg het advies verder met niemand over de besmetting te praten. Bijna eenderde durft niet of slechts enkele familieleden te vertellen over de hiv-status.

While this portrait of Iranian sexual experimentation may be shocking on its surface, it has grown familiar to most people who have visited Iran or followed cultural developments there in the past decade. Less well known is that, for all their promiscuity and seeming sophistication, many of these young Iranians suffer from a lack of sexual education and resources that fits the official culture of pious abstinence rather than the actual one of looseness and risk. The birth control method of choice among Mahdavi's informants is withdrawal. Women who take the pill frequently lack the most basic information and take it only erratically, depriving themselves of almost all of its effect. Condoms are considered so filthy and embarrassing that even people who share florid details about their sex lives with Mahdavi blush at their mention, and no one wants to be seen requesting them at a pharmacy. AIDS, educated young Iranians tell Mahdavi, is transmitted through visits to the dentist or hairdresser, and other STDs come only from a certain unsavory sort of woman. While wealthy women can obtain abortions--illegal in most cases but common, thanks to poor contraception--from sympathetic doctors at vast expense, poorer women acquire on the black market pills or injections meant for animals. Mahdavi went to a back street where dealers sell these medications, just to see how easily they could be acquired. A dealer sold her a vial of pills without the least instruction on what to do with them. Physicians she interviewed told her that they see a great many women seriously injured or rendered infertile by self-administered abortions meant for animals.

Yet there is good news in Mahdavi's study. Close to the ground, where it counts, Iranian doctors, parents, educators and even institutions are bending to the forces of change. For example, since 2000 the Islamic Republic has required Iranians who seek marriage licenses to attend state-administered classes on family planning. One that Mahdavi attended in Tehran's central business district sounds perfectly appalling. A chador-clad woman shrilly lectures a room of gum-snapping, nail-filing, indifferent young women, offering the following counsel: "You must always be ready for your husband's sexual needs. If perchance he is watching a football game on television, you should be resting to prepare yourself, or else preparing your bed for the evening. If you should feel overcome by fatigue yourself, make sure always to ask your husband, 'Is there anything else you need from me?' or 'Would you like to have me later?' before retiring."

But then Mahdavi attends another such class, this time in the city's north, in the upscale shopping district near the Tajrish bazaar. This class covers disease transmission, contraception, fertility, mental health, marital relations and even female sexual pleasure. The teachers wear the less forbidding hijab--head scarf and fitted thigh-length coat--common among their students, and the women attending these classes, Mahdavi reports, confide freely to the teachers about their relationships and their sex lives. Here, and in her chapter about the older generation's response to the sexual revolution, Mahdavi shows us a society beginning to shake off its denial and rigidity out of the sheer necessity of serving the burgeoning needs of its young--a generation of adults who have either grown sympathetic to young people's yearnings or, like Mrs. Erami, recognize that they risk greater losses than they can bear.

MSD brengt in samenwerking met het bedrijf Sanofi Gardasil op de markt, het eerste vaccin ter wereld dat werkzaam is tegen de meest voorkomende virussen die baarmoederhalskanker veroorzaken. Ook concurrent GlaxoSmithKline heeft een vaccin ontwikkeld.

Op termijn zullen meisjes het vaccin gratis krijgen. Op dit moment kost vaccinatie nog 375 euro. Het vaccin bestaat uit drie injecties.

wetenschappers vinden het te vroeg om het vaccin op te nemen in het vaccinatieprogramma, omdat nog niet duidelijk zou zijn hoe lang het vaccin beschermt. Bovendien is ook nog niet bekend wat de eventuele bijwerkingen op langere termijn zijn.

Vanaf september 2009 komt het vaccin tegen het humaan papillomavirus (HPV) in het Rijksvaccinatieprogramma. HPV is de veroorzaker van baarmoederhalskanker.

Meisjes die zijn geboren op of na 1 januari 1997 zullen vanaf september 2009 worden ingeënt tegen HPV. In maart 2009 start een inhaalcampagne bestemd voor alle meisjes die zijn geboren tussen 1993 en 1996.

GlaxoSmithKline de opdracht heeft gegeven HPV-vaccins te leveren.

En vertu du principe de "qisas" – ou juste châtiment – prévu par le droit islamique iranien, le tribunal a jugé que l'homme devait à son tour être rendu aveugle par un jet d'acide.

Un Iranien, qui avait rendu aveugle une femme ayant refusé sa demande en mariage en lui jetant de l'acide au visage, a été condamné par la justice au même châtiment, rapporte, jeudi 27 novembre, le quotidien Etemad-e Melli.

The document maintained that antiretrovirals were toxic. And it suggested that powerful vested interests — drug companies, governments, scientists — pushed the consensus view of AIDS in a quest for money and power, while peddling centuries-old white racist beliefs that depicted Africans as sexually rapacious.

Jacob Zuma, who is expected to become president after next year's election, himself made a famously questionable remark about AIDS. In his 2006 rape trial, in which he was acquitted of sexually assaulting a family friend, he testified that he sought to reduce his chances of being infected with HIV by taking a shower after sex. Nonetheless, he seems to have more conventional views on the pandemic.

A new study by Harvard researchers estimates that the South African government would have prevented the premature deaths of 365,000 people earlier this decade if it had provided antiretroviral drugs to AIDS patients and widely administered drugs to help prevent pregnant women from infecting their babies.

Sexually transmitted HIV infections are on the rise in Iran and the Islamic Republic is setting up telephone hotlines to help fight the problem, a senior official said in comments published on Tuesday.

Iran has a low prevalence of HIV infections with a rate of about 0.16 percent of the adult population compared with 0.8 percent in North America, a senior U.N. official in the country told Reuters last year. But the official warned that infection rates in Iran were increasing because of both a growing inflow of cheap heroin from Afghanistan, the world's number one opium poppy producer, and a rise in the number of sexually transmitted cases.