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Hawaii teenagers seem not to be getting the message about safe sex, at least not as clearly as it’s been received on the mainland.
A study by Indiana University’s Center for Sexual Health Promotion last week produced a generally rosy outlook about the nation’s young people and their willingness to take steps to avoid unwanted pregnancy and, in particular, the transmission of disease.
The center reported that nearly 80 percent of boys and 60 percent of girls under 18 said that they had used condoms during sex. That’s considerably more frequent use than what’s reported for adults.
But the picture in this state is far less upbeat. And that local reality means Hawaii teens are more vulnerable to sexually transmitted diseases such as chlamydia. State health data underscores the reason for concern: The chlamydia rate in Hawaii generally ranks among the 10 highest nationally, with the highest rates occurring among people ages 15 to 24.
The 2009 Hawaii Youth Behavioral Risk Survey shows teens here having the lowest condom usage of any state in the country. Less than 48 percent reported using condoms during their last experience with sexual intercourse. That’s 7 percent lower than in the previous survey in 2007 and about 12 percent lower than the national average.
In the same Hawaii survey, fewer than half the teens said they’d ever received instruction from a health care professional about preventing STDs. So there’s certainly room to improve teen education on that score.
In a related issue, last week the state Department of Health released its first Pregnancy Risk Assessment Monitoring System Trend Report, which showed about 45 percent of pregnancies were reported by the mothers as unintended. That figure rockets up to 73 percent among women under 20.
"This is a call to action to rethink what we can do differently to reach those populations that we’re obviously not reaching," said Jackie Berry, executive director of the Healthy Mothers Healthy Babies Coalition of Hawaii. She’s right, and the same conclusion can be applied to the issue of STD protection, too.
The bottom line is that public health officials and nonprofits should refocus their outreach efforts to a younger age group that seemingly is in the dark.
Such an effort ought to benefit from the findings of another new initiative, funded through a federal grant, seeking ways of reducing teen pregnancy. Teens who get better information about avoiding pregnancy also could be targeted for some tough talk about preventing disease as well.
The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services on Sept. 30 announced the grants to states, including $10 million to be spent over the next five years by the University of Hawaii Center for Disability Studies and the Hawaii Youth Services Network.
Teens engage in a lot of trial and error in the process of growing up; some of the experimentation teaches lessons and leaves them with nothing worse than a few educational hard knocks.
But a lax and uninformed attitude about sex can have disastrous consequences: health-threatening diseases and pregnancies that teens are ill-equipped to handle, producing babies they’re unprepared to raise. This is not a problem that the state should leave untended. Even in times of tight fiscal resources, Hawaii needs to find some means of putting its teens back on a safer track.
