That condom thing

THE plan to distribute condom among high school students is causing many a protest among the conservatives as they insist that doing so will encourage promiscu i t y.

This argument has long been used and as old as the young professional in his late 20 or early 30s who was begotten by a teenage mom in the 1980s.

I remember the time in the early 1990s when the Tambayan Center for Children’s Rights was in the middle of controversy because they were teaching reproductive health care to the girls on the streets.

During those days, gangs were aplenty, and among these gangs were girls who were in high-risk sexual behaviors. It was not unusual for the male sin a gang to have sex with several of the female gangmembers.

That was also the time when the term “buntog” became mainstream to refer to young girls into sex, whether free or paid.

Buntog is a Visayan word for quail, a euphemism for “ibong mababa ang lipad” (‘Low-flying bird’used to refer to prostituted women). When the use of “buntog” to refer to these girls was discouraged, the community soon coined another, “swaplat,” to mean girls who’d have sex for drugs or other favors.

Tambayan then was honest enough to say that whether they teach the children about their reproductive health or not, and providing contraceptives for birth control and condoms for HIV-Aids (Human Immunodeficiency Virus-Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome) control, the children on the streets will be experimenting with sex anyw ay.

Thus, it’s better that they know the whole kit and caboodle of how their organs really work rather than learn it from their peers who are equally ignorant.

Bottomline: sex is a reality among the young, more so among children who lack parental supervision.

Whether you talk about it with them or not, there is a great risk that they will anyway.

What with the Internet now available right on their mobiles and commu nication with partners can no longer be easily screened. Who get the raw deal? The children who are not properly attended to.

The rich ones whose parents are busy with their businesses may stumble a bit and suffer from gossip-mongers for a year or two but many will be able to return and build a life for herself and her child.

But the poor ones whose parents cannot attend to them are at greater risk of falling into the slats and never recovering, but this time burdened with the care of a baby she is too young to raise on her own.

It’s the 21st century and we see a lot of single mothers. Some chose to be, others were impregnated but chose to make the best of her situation. In many, the more resilient ones, the ones who made a better life afterwards are those who have family or peer support.

Many of those who never got into pre-marital sex as teenagers are those who have open communication with their parents, while those who have open communication but ended up pregnant anyway have found it easy to bounce back and start a better life for the child.

If you review all the cases you have encountered, you will see the big role of the family here. But we know that just saying that parents should be more open to their children and that sex education should be the responsibility of the parents just doesn’t solve the problem; more so with the rampaging numbers of HIV-Aids cases the country is suffering from.

As Tambayan before said, whether they teach the children about their reproductive health or not the children on the streets will be experimenting with sex anyway.

Thus it’s better that those experimenting have the proper information about what they are getting into. Closing our eyes to the realities around us only complicates an already complicated problem.

Remember, before the problem was really just about teenage pregnancy, then came sexually transmitted infections, and then, HIV-Aids. As reported by the Reproductive Health and Wellness Center last year, HIVAids cases in Davao City reached 401 from January to November 2016 of which 345 were found to have HIV while 56 others have full-blown Aids.

Of this number, 381 are males and 20 are females of which 207 were aged between 25-34, and 154 had ages between 15-24. Those are very disturbing numbers and very disturbing ages. In pontificating against sex education for decades, the Philippines now has what is called a youth epidemic of HIV-Aids.

Now, who’s the end-loser here? Not us, the properly informed and those who grew up guided by parents who are properly informed as well. But there are only a few of us, and we’re growing old. In refusing to see the problem and the realities, we are gambling our future.