Providing Communities Effective Tools for Prevention Comprehensive HIV education interventions are needed to provide young people with the knowledge and skills to make often difficult decisions about sex. Safer Choices is one program proven effective in creating environments at school, in the community, and at home that are supportive of students' decisions to abstain from sex or to protect themselves from HIV infection and other STDs if they do decide to have sex. Safer Choices is now being considered for inclusion in CDC's Research to Classroom project. This project identifies programs that have evidence of reducing health risk behaviors among youth. Once identified, CDC provides resources to ensure that interventions, including training, are available nationwide for those interested in using them.
Many young people establish patterns of sexual behavior in their teens.
Early One poster presentation at this week's AIDS conference includes data collected in the Youth Risk Behavior Survey that point to the need to prepare teenagers to make healthy decisions about sex. According to the survey, the median age of sexual initiation in 1997 was 16.8 years old. However, more than a quarter of teens surveyed became sexually active by the age of 15. Early initiators were less likely than late initiators to have used a condom the last time they had sex and more likely to have had multiple partners in the three months prior to the survey. These findings indicate a need for appropriately timed interventions that reach students before they establish patterns of unsafe sexual behavior.