A New Resource/Article: "Latin America, Caribbean Embrace Sex Ed as HIV Prevention"

On July 31st and August 1st, Health and Education ministers from most countries in the region came together in Mexico City at the invitation of the Mexican government. The meeting was designed to bring together the two sectors most responsible for sex education - health and education - to create a declaration that specifically highlights and creates government commitments to supporting comprehensive sex education as a foundation for stemming the tide of HIV/AIDS in the region.

No meeting such as this has ever occurred in the region (or any other region) before. The seeds for such a meeting were sown several years ago when civil society organizations in Mexico worked with the government entities responsible for addressing HIV/AIDS to create a national campaign to support sex education as HIV prevention. SIECUS reported on this work in our publication A Shared Border, A Common Agenda.

The success of this effort highlighted the role that comprehensive sex education plays as a foundation for HIV prevention. And, when additional interventions are laid on top of this foundation, for example, in those communities with increased risk, we establish a greater overarching strategy that helps get us out of the pin-prick prevention that is essentially disaster aversion. In Mexico, it is taking hold and working well.

The recent meeting of the Ministers was an opportunity for Mexico to engage the rest of the region in a dialogue to replicate and build upon the work in the country. The summit consisted of two meetings - one technical and one more official that involved the Ministers themselves. Neither meeting was not without controversy. Several countries sought to highlight and stress the need for abstinence in the declaration. Other countries reacted strongly and pushed back, not the least of which was Brazil. It is no coincidence that Brazil is one of the countries that has entirely rejected U.S. government assistance to combat HIV/AIDS in their own country and they did so with a clear indication that the promotion of abstinence and marriage was inconsistent with Brazils' own values and regard for human rights standards in the context of public health.

In fact, one of the most startling things from this technical meeting was the utter rebuke of using the word abstinence precisely because of the Bush administration's politicization of that concept. While everyone obviously supports abstinence as a good option for young people, many can no longer embrace the term because of the nonsense and destruction its dogged promotion has done to global HIV/AIDS prevention efforts. What a sad legacy and lesson on overreach for the Bush Administration's war on evidence-based prevention."

By: William Smith and Esther Corona-Vargas
Published on: RH Reality Check
Published: August 06, 2008

To access the complete article, please visit http://www.rhrealitycheck.org/blog/2008/08/06/latin-america-caribbean-embrace-sex-ed-hiv-prevention