I look back at my teenage years now and wonder how my friends and I survived somewhat unscathed. It wasn’t just the bad dye jobs, even worse relationships and being in places we weren’t meant to be; there was also the massive lack of information and misinformation about sex that was out there. We just had no real way of knowing if many of the things we heard from each other were true, and we certainly weren’t going to ask our parents.
Contraception wasn’t something that was really discussed, which meant that many people in my age group came up with their own methods of how not to get pregnant or abstained from sex altogether. Thinking back to some of the almost comical things I have heard in passing, we should probably have a lot more babies around than we ended up with. Sexually transmitted diseases weren’t something that anyone thought about and were very mistakenly mentally assigned to minorities. The only goal was not to have a child. HIV and AIDS happened to other people.
I thought things would drastically change with time; the internet, more awareness, a more open society and enough campaigns to drown a small ship. However, if the latest international school-based study conducted in 2022 is to be believed, they have not changed much at all.
Despite the fact there has been an increase in the reported use of contraception over the past decade, 53% of sexually active Maltese 15-year-old girls and 28% of boys are not using condoms during sexual intercourse. Yes, the percentage of girls using the contraceptive pill during their last sexual experience has gone up from 6% in 2018 to 25% in 2022 but it would seem that the perception that STDs are not really a “heterosexual issue” remains as steadfast as it was some 20 years ago.
The time to take a different and more studied approach to speaking about sex with facts rather than emotions as a framework has long been overdue- Anna Marie Galea
It is of tantamount importance that when studies like this are carried out, our authorities take note and find effective ways to put findings like these to good use. While the essence of human nature has not changed, our youth face many challenges that weren’t quite so amplified when social media didn’t exist and there were fewer frequent technological advances.
Indeed, these very different struggles from the ones previous generations have had go a long way to help explain the fact that sexual activity among teenagers, particularly boys, has decreased over the past decade.
The time to take a different and more studied approach to speaking about sex with facts rather than emotions as a framework has long been overdue, and, yet, this continues to be a taboo topic that not many feel inclined to touch.
Whether we like it or not, our teenagers are still having unprotected sex, and with our HIV and syphilis transmission rates remaining the highest in the EU and our gonorrhea rates standing at the fifth-highest, it’s impossible not to feel uneasy when studies like the one above are published.
Our teenagers have spoken.
It’s up to us to listen to what they say and take action.