Adolescent Sex—And Its Risks—On the Rise

Tuol Tompong High School, its courtyard packed with rows of bicycles and motos and teeming with adolescents taking a break from class, is a typical school with typical students. Garbed in white and blue, they joke, tease, chase and flirt before it’s time to go back inside. Some of them are couples.

Later on, after school, beyond the eyes of watchful teachers, a growing number of those couples will sneak away somewhere and have sex. And it won’t always be safe sex, students said.

In the lives of Cambodian youths, old traditions and modern influences are colliding, making it easy to have sex, but difficult to talk about it.

That makes them less likely to buy or use a condom, and ignorant to some of the dangers of sex.

Outside the school walls, a group of 12th-grade boys sat and watched students file out of the gates at the end of the school day. They all agreed that more students are having sex, but only one of them admitted to doing it himself.

“I used to try it” at the brothels, said the 19-year-old, who declined to give his name. “But I don’t have a girlfriend yet.”

If he finds a girlfriend, though, he won’t have to use a condom, he said. At the brothels “we use protection, of course,” he said. “But for the girl in school, [there is] no need….Some girls drink medicine already because they don’t want to get pregnant during their studies.”

His is a popular opinion: Sex workers have AIDS, but good girls don’t; there is no need to use a condom with someone you know and trust.

The National AIDS Authority is trying to change those ideas, but is still encountering resistance from a society that values old traditions, said Tia Phalla, secretary general of the authority.

“Sex is dynamic. It is not static,” he said. Parents often forget that things are not the same as they were 20 or 30 years ago, he said. “It’s much more different now.”

Many students find it difficult to talk to their parents about sex, said Var Chivorn, associate executive director for the Reproductive Health Association of Cambodia (RHAC), which has a clinic near Tuol Tompong High School.

The clinic also has a library popular with students. Some just come to read books and pamphlets on sex, or sing karaoke. For others, the library acts as a sort of cover for kids coming in for check-ups. Many are there to be counseled on family planning, or to be checked out for sexually transmitted diseases and other medical problems.

“In general, we see that the percentage of young clients…has increased compared to last year,” Var Chivorn said. Whether that means an increase in sexual activity, or an increase of awareness about RHAC, he’s not sure. Either way, he said, there’s a definite interest in sex among students.

At lunch time last week, the library’s only table was full. Boys and girls were cramped in seats around the edge of the room. The majority were girls, glancing around nervously, sheepishly reading over each other’s shoulders.

Their timidity about sexual subjects has come from a culture that tells them only bad girls talk about sex, bad girls have sex and bad girls carry condoms, explained two of the RHAC’s peer counselors.

But that isn’t stopping girls from having sex, said Ty Chan Raksmey, a peer educator and 12th grader at Beng Trabek high school.  A large percentage of students are now engaging in pre-marital sex, she said. She works with Koh Kimpal, a 21-year-old graduate who still counsels at the school. Their job is to make information available to students who want it.

For the past three years, RHAC has been working to get information to the kids who need it. The health association has around 400 such educators in different schools, both in Phnom Penh and in provincial capitals. They are trained by RHAC to discuss STDs, pregnancy, family planning and safe sex. They are in the schools every day, listening to students’ stories.

Ty Chan Raksmey, 20, and Koh Kimpal estimated that as many as 30 percent of high school girls and 50 percent of high school boys are having sex, something unheard of in the old days.

Everyday life for kids in schools is starting to mean sexual exploration and changing partners, the peer educators said. And with youth abandon, adolescents are beginning to face the consequences: failed relationships, unwanted pregnancies, peer pressure and a heightened risk of STDs and AIDS.

Adults can also pose a challenge. Older women continually chastise Ty Chan Raksmey for talking about sex, even when she explains that she has been through RHAC training courses and is trying to help young women.

“They’re still confused about me,” she said. “Of course our tradition is different…. But it’s easy to talk to other peers. It’s easy to talk to someone the same age.”

Her classmates often come to her with questions about their periods, pregnancy, safe sex and sexually transmitted diseases.

“They don’t want to talk to their parents,” Ty Chan Raksmey said. “We talk about the styles of sex that are safe and pregnancy. They ask me if they can have sex when they’ve got their period, and what days have no risk of getting pregnant.”

Boys ask questions related more to their own sexual feelings, rather than just health.

“In our discussions,” said Koh Kimpal, “boys often ask me how they can know if the girl has had sex before, how to avoid disease and about the growth of their bodies.”

Boys and girls also don’t seem to mind finding some things out on their own. In the early evenings, Phnom Penh’s streets are crowded with hordes of adolescents, cruising with their motos side-by-side, laughing as they swerve around each other.

Some bikes carry co-ed passengers, the boy driving, the girl sitting snugly behind him, her arms wrapped around his waist and her head resting on his back. More and more, these couples are doing more than cruising.

“They like to go to the guest houses along the riverside, or to houses in papaya, sugar or fruit plantations,” Koh Kimpal said.

There is one place, he explained, near Wat Norout, across the Monivong bridge, where kids like to go. They can have a quiet walk around the pagoda, or a picnic somewhere, and then head off to a guest house down a side-street near the pagoda along the river.

The owners of the guest houses sometimes have condoms available, he said.

Kids don’t have to go far to find a place to have sex. “Sex places,” as they are called, exist throughout the city. Part guest house, part brothel, they rent rooms for between $0.79 an hour and $2.10 a night.

One guest house owner, declining to be named, said that before tightened restrictions from the city government, he would be able to rent out around 600 rooms on the block—all of them in one night.

Most of the patrons are young boys with sex workers, he said, but around 10 percent of the kids using his rooms bring sweethearts from school. He said he too has seen an increase in the number of high-school aged kids coming to his guest house.

Every night of the week, his guest house is busy, said one neighbor. The guest house is more convenient than going to brothel districts like Tuol Kok, she said.

“Tuol Kok is OK, but this is very near the school,” she said.

Rooms are cramped and bare at the guest house, with sheetless mattresses on beds and condom stickers on the walls outside.

Not all sexual partners pay attention to the signs. The cultural pressures not to have sex before marriage drive trysts to a clandestine extreme. The boys are too shy to buy condoms, as are the girls.

“No one brings a condom when they just plan to go out for a picnic,” Ty Chan Raksmey said. “To bring a condom along would be embarrassing if anyone found out.”

“Girls don’t dare buy condoms,” she said. “Only the guys. The other problem is that the pharmacies just sell them, but don’t explain how to use them.”

When to use a condom, even if you have one, can become complicated, too.

According to a study of garment factory workers conducted by CARE International, condom use is always a touchy subject, usually left up to the man to decide.

“Some participants say that condoms are not necessary because they trust their sweethearts,” the study reported. “It seems likely, therefore, that the association of condoms with partners that are not trusted would make it very difficult for either a young man or woman to suggest using condoms with a sweetheart.”

Despite a growing interest in sex, there is not enough information to match it. There is no curriculum in school to cover sex education. The Ministry of Education distributes a book on HIV/AIDS awareness and reproductive health, but does not teach it., said Var Chivorn, of RHAC.

The curriculum is already compressed and teachers aren’t trained to teach sex education, he said.

Students are left to corral information wherever they can get it— from other students, their relatives or from the media. But that scattered system has left some startling information gaps about sex.

They know how to do it, but they don’t know how to do it safely or responsibly, experts said.

Only 7.5 percent of girls and 4.6 percent of boys recently surveyed by RHAC could tell when in the women’s menstrual cycle that pregnancy was likely to occur.

Of 43 students admitting to being sexually active, 10 said they had not used a condom the last time they had sex. Six said they didn’t know or couldn’t remember.

The 43, gleaned from a survey of 1,197, represent just 3.8 percent. But peer educators from the association estimate much higher numbers. Of the girls having sex, Ty Chan Raksmey estimates 10 percent have had “a lot” of partners.

RHAC asked students what sex-based topics they could remember discussing in the past six months. Seven percent had discussed sexual urges, 33 percent had talked about AIDS or HIV, the virus that leads to AIDS. Twenty-five percent had discussed how to use condoms and 14 percent talked about where to get them.

Of the RHAC-surveyed students, 50 percent said they believed discussions on sex or reproductive health topics would lead to more young people having sex.

Koh Kimpal said the number of people having pre-marital sex is climbing “because of foreign culture, porno films and movies.” There are romantic Thai dramas on TV, and innumerable US Hollywood romances available in the markets. Sexual images are all around, even on calendars, he said.

He noted that Cambodians “are now more fashionable. Now, men even try to make themselves look good…. Men and women are more attractive now. They wear more sexy clothes.”

Koh Kimpal was speaking in Khmer, but had to put “sexy clothes” in English. It’s a popular expression now, he said, a reflection of the Western traditions now at work on the psyches of young Cambodians. With more provocative clothing, he said, “when women and men look at each other, something touches their emotions.”

 

 

 

 

 

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