 photo: ©Phil schermeister/corbis |
Student life can be fraught with one-night stands and seventies revival nights, but what do our bright young things care about sex bugs and the global fight for cheap Aids drugs? Rebecca Holman finds out
Freshers’ is the perfect opportunity for many young people leaving home for the first time to week drink far too much, experiment with drugs and have casual sex. For some, the fun doesn’t stop with the first week of term. With different parties and events organised throughout the year it is easy to look back on your time at university as one long haze of cider-infused cocktails, seventies revival nights and ill-advised one night-stands with geography students.
As fun as all this sounds, one of the consequences is a worrying rise in the number of sexually-transmitted infections among young people, with 1.5 million attendances reported at GUM clinics in England, Wales and Northern Ireland during 2002. This translates to a 15 per cent increase on the previous year.
This increase is largely made up of a huge increase in STI diagnoses among young people. Ten times as many young women aged 16-24 were diagnosed with chlamydia in 2000/1 than any other age group; three times as many as young men.
Chlamydia may currently be the most common STI in the UK, but it is by no means the only one affecting students. Levels of gonorrhoea and syphilis have increased sharply in the past decade or so too, with young people bearing the brunt of the increase and, particularly with the last two infections, young gay men.
Sexually-transmitted infections are, of course, no big secret for young people, and most universities run some sort of sexual health awareness campaign.
 Students of Reading University meet the SSAC speakers on tour photo: ©reading evening post |
Students and young people can be particularly lax when it comes to practising safer sex, with the fear of unwanted pregnancies often being seen as the only issue worth worrying about.
Hannah Briggs, a 20 year-old student from Leeds, admits that although sexual health promotions exist in universities, they do not raise much awareness among students. “The messages tend to go in one ear and out the other.”
She explains: “Most universities are good for trying to promote awareness, but students just don’t know how easy it is to catch things or how widespread they are.” Hannah warns that girls should be especially careful as, in her experience, young men will never bother to get tested, and are “totally clueless”. In fact she may be right here. On a global level and according to SPW (Student Partnerships Worldwide), teenage girls and women are nearly five to seven times more likely to contract HIV than their (straight) male counterparts.
 On World Aids Day, Student Stop Aids campaigners descended on DfID to welcome its pledge to increase DfID’s annual contribution to UN Aids by £3 million to £6 million. |
Denise is Nurse Manager at the medical centre of King’s College, London. She feels that much of the problem lies with sexual health clinics becoming inundated, particularly in the capital. This leaves long waiting times at the drop-in services and difficulty in making appointments. (see ‘The Mystery Shoppers - Young People and Sexual Health Clinics’).
An alternative is to offer the same services as GUM clinics at university medical centres. But there is no standardisation here. Some clinics offer a full range of services while others only provide a nurse drop-in service.
 Campaign members Sean Barry, Clint Walters, Sentamu Sparks and Jenny Ross |
King’s College, London offers a wide, though by no means complete range of services (but they do more than most GPs). Denise admits: “One of the problems lies in the attitudes of the students, who are aware it’s a problem, but for other people.” This is despite colleges like King’s putting on their own sexual health awareness events, many of which coincide once a year with World Aids Day. In King’s case this is SHAG: Sexual Health And Guidance.
Even when it does affect them, Denise says, “they don’t necessarily do something about it.”
Clearly it’s not just the services available that have to change, but the attitudes of those who use them.
SPW (Student Partnerships Worldwide) took matters of student apathy into its own hands when it launched the Students Stop Aids Campaign (SSAC) earlier this year. They set up Students Stop Aids societies at Freshers’ Fairs across the country. Six youth organisations now support the campaign.
An SSAC speakers’ tour of 11 universities took place at the end of October in which several young people from around the world discussed the ways in which HIV and Aids have affected their lives with some of the students from the universities involved.
According to Jenny Ross, campaigns and advocacy manager for the SSAC, the aim of the tour was to “raise awareness on campuses of the global Aids epidemic,” though this was to be done in a fairly informal manner, not as a lecture with an academic format.
Jenny says: “Young people are the group most affected by HIV and Aids globally, and are also the group with the best chance of tackling this epidemic. This is why students have come together in this campaign to make demands.”
The tour enabled speakers to share their experiences of the Aids epidemic with young people in the UK. It was officially launched with a parliamentary debate (see News, PN 97/98).
Jenny has been impressed by the response young people across the country have given the tour, estimating that it reached 1,700 people directly, and many more through interviews given on local BBC and commercial radio.
She was struck by one thing, however, that: “Young people have no sense of what it is like to be HIV positive.”
She hopes that the tour will make young people more aware of their sexual behaviour, and feels that it is important for young people to mobilise themselves: “this is a crisis of our generation. Older people and those in authority are reluctant to recognise young people are having sex, and healthcare professionals need to be more aware of how they talk to young people.”
Uganda’s Sentuma Sparks, a 24-year-old IT student, was one of the speakers on the SSAC tour. He became interested in Aids prevention work when he saw how poverty and lack of empowerment among young people allowed the Aids crisis to flourish in his own country. “There is much more information on sexual health awareness available to young people in the UK,” says Sparks. “But they don’t necessarily know where to look for it. And they sometimes lack the political will that can be found in Ugandans.”
Clint Walters, 24, runs the UK’s HIV peer support group HIFY (Health Initiatives for Young People with HIV), and also took part on the SSAC tour. He praised it as “a good stepping stone” for future work with young people. However, he was shocked too to discover that most students attending had very little in-depth knowledge of HIV and Aids, thus emphasising the need to generate awareness among young people. Clint was also surprised to learn that he was the only HIV positive speaker on the tour, indicating how difficult young positive people find it to speak out.
There is no standardised compulsory sex education on the national curriculum in the UK, and this could go along way to explain why such stigma and lack of awareness exists. “It is still a huge uphill battle,” continues Clint, “but the success of the Student Stop Aids university speaker tour, and the interest generated by it, are certainly positive signs.”
It is not just issues of sexual health awareness in the UK that the speaker tour raised. Awareness of the global Aids crisis was also a prevalent theme.
Jenny Ross believes that young people are not as apathetic as we are sometimes led to believe. “The war in Iraq showed that young people are interested in international issues, not apathetic and selfish”.
SPW organises programmes where volunteers (often students taking a year out) can travel to countries in Africa and Asia and live among communities working as peer educators in rural primary and secondary schools for between seven to nine months. Many of these students, on their return to the UK, have become cornerstones of their Students Stop Aids Societies, putting the invaluable skills they learnt abroad to good use here.
So maybe students aren’t all as lazy, selfish and apathetic as some of the evidence suggests. However, we still have to ask, if students across the country can get so fired up about the war in Iraq, why can’t they get fired up over the global Aids crisis, which is causing the death and suffering of many more people? Why can’t they get fired up enough to worry about their own sexual health and that of their peers?
What is currently missing from young people is the political will and motivation to look at the issues being raised, and it is here that SPW seems to have the right idea. However there is still a long way to go before young people in the UK are managing their sexual health in the way they should. Until then, just remember to avoid cider - and dodgy 70s nights!
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