Sex-Education & Counseling: Effective Prevention & Management Tools for HIV/AIDS

Just as schools are critical settings for preparing students academically, they are also vital partners in helping young people take responsibility for their own health. Control of sexually transmitted infections (STIs) is feasible, leads to improved sexual and reproductive health and contributes to preventing HIV transmission. The most advanced HIV epidemics have developed under conditions of poor STI control, particularly where ulcerative STIs were prevalent.

Thus, education-based prevention programs or “sex education” programs are among the strongest means of curtailing the spread of HIV/AIDS. It is widely accepted that young people have a right to sex education because it is a means by which they can protect themselves against unintended pregnancies and sexually transmitted diseases (STDs), including HIV infection. Sex education programs, implemented in diverse venues including schools or medical clinics, typically provide information to young people to help them form healthy attitudes and beliefs about sex, sexual identity, relationshipsand intimacy. Sex education programs often also provide skills-based

training to accompany knowledge so that young people can make informed decisions about their behavior, as well as feel capable of acting on and communicating those decisions to others. Sex education programs designed to reduce sexual and drug-associated HIV risk behaviors are, for all intents and purposes, today’s “HIV vaccine,” but there has been a great deal of debate on what constitutes appropriate content for sex education programs for young people. This paper identifies effective components of sex education programs/interventions, and the effectiveness of, evidence-based HIV/AIDS prevention programs for diverse adolescent populations.