Early, late and non-participants in sexual intercourse: A profile of black South African first-year university students
✍ Scribed by Lionel Nicholas; Colin Tredoux
- Publisher
- Springer US
- Year
- 1997
- Tongue
- English
- Weight
- 358 KB
- Volume
- 19
- Category
- Article
- ISSN
- 0165-0653
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
✦ Synopsis
This study investigated the differences among early-, late-and non-participants in sexual intercourse. 1817 first-year black South African university students completed a structured questionnaire, which tapped their knowledge, attitudes, beliefs and practices about sexuality. The results revealed significant differences among the three groups with regard to their sources of sexual knowledge, approval of pre-marital sex, first intercourse partner relationship, number of sexual partners, contraceptive use, satisfaction with first sexual intercourse and parental communication about contraception.
In South Africa, many parents fear that the provision of sexual information to their children would inevitably lead to sexual experimentation, intercourse and pregnancy (Weekend Argus Correspondent, 1993;Nicholas, 1993). Apart from parents' religious or moral concerns about pre-marital sexual intercourse, the potential health risks of early intercourse (e.g. increased risk of cervical and uterinal cancer) are considerable. South African parents' efforts to ensure that their children are not exposed to sex information have led to public protests at schools against efforts to introduce both AIDS-and sex education into selected schools (Weekend Argus Correspondent, 1993). Parents and religious leaders attacked the introduction of a pilot sex education programme into south African Indian schools in 1993, expressing fears that their children would be corrupted. Such programmes had not been taught before in these schools (Chothia, 1993). Cilliers (1989) found that all the school departments he consulted supported the idea of the school as a means for AIDS prevention, yet it is evident that sex education does not have similar support in black and white schools (Kagan, 1989;Naidoo, 1994). In spite of parents' fears about the effects of sex education, the extremely rigid censorship of sexual information which has existed for decades, and the paucity of intra familial communication about sex, unwanted teenage pregnancy and other sex-related problems are high in South Africa (Nicholas, 1994). In Cape Town, in 1987, of 2800 teenage mothers, 2300 were unmarried. In 1986, the percentage of white illegitimate births was 11.2% of all white births in Cape Town and in