i Report Issue No. 3 2005 - Philippine Center for Investigative ...

FOCUS ON FILIPINO YOUTH
CHERYL CHAN
Generation Perils of
Sex
UP A FLIGHT OF
stairs, in a
room with red, yellow, purple,
and green walls, the talk is all
about sex, all of the time. This
is, after all, the hotline center of
the Teen Foundation for Adolescent
Development (FAD), an organization
dedicated to adoles-
cent health. In this room, among
a few potted plants, counselors
are always ready to answer calls
from youths and discuss with
them the consequences of premarital
or unprotected sex.
In the past, typical hotline
questions involved girl-boy relationships
and family, school, and
peer issues. But in the last year
alone, the number of inquiries
about sexually transmitted infections
(STI) has soared. It now
ranks third among the top five
most commonly asked issues.
“It’s very alarming,” says
Cecilia Villa, president of FAD,
which has its offices right smack
in the heart of Manila’s university
belt. Awareness is higher
now, she explains, but very
few people realize they can be
infected with a disease because
of one mistaken assumption or
a momentary lapse of judgment.
With the invincibility characteristic
of the young, they “know
about it but don’t think it can
happen to them.”
Dr. Rosendo Roque, head of
adolescent health of the Philippine
Obstetrical and Gynecological
Society (POGS), is himself
quite worried. There is a lack of
statistics and woeful underreporting,
but based on feedback
from obstetricians and gynecologists
across the country and
from his private practice, Roque
believes STIs among youth is a
growing health concern.
STIs are infections of the
reproductive system, transmitted
through sexual contact generally
through warm, moist mucous
membranes such as the vagina,
anus, urethra, and the mouth.
“STI” is used interchangeably
with the more common term
“STD” or sexually transmitted
disease. Some organizations,
including the Department of
Health (DOH) and the World
Health Organization, are now
using the more politically correct
STI. The most common
STIs diagnosed are gonorrhea,
known in the vernacular as tulo,
chlamydia, trichomoniasis, genital
herpes, and genital warts.
There are many factors behind
the increase of STIs, says
Dr. Teresita Brion, an ob-gyn at
St. Luke’s Hospital in Quezon
City. “There’s the media.
There’s the barkada. There’s
the breakdown of families. You
don’t need hormones surging
to want to experiment.”
There is certainly no lack of
stimuli either. Today’s youth are
exposed to sex and sexuality
earlier and in larger doses. There
may still be the constant nagging
of elders about sex being a sin,
but between advertisements us-
ing sex to sell products, double
entendres on noontime variety
shows, and pirated pornographic
DVDs sold for less than P80 in
Quiapo to gyrating MTV starlets
and explicit lyrics of hip-hop
songs, young people are constantly
bombarded with messages
about sex. These contribute
to a shift in cultural values that
makes casual sex more permissible
and traditional preconditions
for sex such as marriage or true
love increasingly irrelevant.
As a result, Filipino youths
are having sex earlier. Last year,
Roque’s youngest patient was all
of 14. This year he has a 12-yearold.
Brion sees patients who are
sexually active even before their
first menstrual cycle. According
to the 2002 Young Adult Fertility
and Sexuality (YAFS) survey of
the University of the Philippines
Population Institute, the average
age for the first sexual encounter
for both men and women is 18.
About 55 percent of these first
sexual experiences were not
planned or were something the
teenagers did not want to happen
at that time.
Premarital sex is also
becoming more accepted,
its prevalence rising from 18
percent in 1994 to 23 percent in
2002. But the sex is often unplanned,
sporadic, or a product
of either being nadala (carried
away) or peer pressure. It often
takes place before teens learn
about STIs and other health
risks. “They still don’t know
what is going on in them,”
says Roque. “Most of them are
getting into it because of peer
pressure or experimentation.
They are not well-guided.”
He also cites the impact
of broken families, absentee
parents, and lack of role
models created by the mass
exodus of Filipinos overseas.
Parents abroad shower their
children with gifts in order to
compensate for their absence,
so the children grow up in an
environment of material excess
without proper guidance.
In today’s sexually charged
landscape, there is a surfeit of
teenagers left on their own to
figure out their own values.
Dr. Brion suspects that
experimentation on bisexuality
and homosexuality, as well as
one-night stands and having
sex “for old times’ sake” or
“just because” have become increasingly
common. And while
the dominant practice is still to
have a single partner, there is a
trend toward multiple partners,
especially among young men.
YAFS data show that about 50
percent of men have had multiple
sex partners compared to
about 11 percent of women.
THE CALLERS of FAD’s phonea-friend
hotline are a good mix
of students and young professionals.
Most are male. One
possible reason is because males
are more likely to have multiple
partners and are therefore more
vulnerable to contracting an STI.
At the same time, some STIs
tend to be asymptomatic among
women. Only 20 percent of
women, for example, exhibit
symptoms of gonorrhea; just half
show symptoms of trichomoniasis,
which is marked by painful,
burning urination and a yellowgreen
discharge among females.
The rest are thus unaware of the
ticking time bomb in their bodies
until it is too late, or when
too many complications have
already set in.
STIs become a serious
public health concern when
ignored: in women, gonorrhea
can lead to pelvic inflammatory
disease, which increases
the risk of infertility and ectopic
pregnancy. Chlamydia, left
untreated, can spread to the
upper reproductive tract and
in women, infect the uterus,
fallopian tubes and ovaries,
44 PHILIPPINE CENTER FOR INVESTIGATIVE JOURNALISM I REPORT