THE JAKARTA POST - SUNDAY, APRIL 7, 2002 - PAGE 7
Whether it's for reproductive or recreative purposes, safe sex is always worth campaigning for, particularly for teenagers.
Take "Roni" for example. As a freshman at a local private university, he tried to fit in with his five new colleagues: going to places, eating, drinking and hanging out together.
Rony confessed to his gang, that he never had a girlfriend or never watched porn movies, a fact that he perceived a normal thing but surprisingly had sparked embarrassing comments from his gang, and as word travel fast, from other students the next day.
First he got confused but the insult had encouraged his curiosity to try what he hadn't done before.
Riana has another story. She fell in love with a "cool" boy and after six months of going out together he asked her for a kiss. Six months later he then asked her to "prove" her love for him. She knew what he meant and gently turned him down.
A week later, he came to her with the same demand, saying that her refusal meant that she didn't really love him. Riana didn't know what to do but she didn't want to lose the boy she loved.
Confusion, fear, and anxiety are common among teenagers living in a more permissive society, with pressures from their peer groups and other people close to them.
This condition often puts teenagers, which represent 45 million of Indonesia's population, in difficult positions and trigger their curiosit to try without assessing the consequences.
With prevailing negative influences, like drugs, free sex and pornography among others, activists and researchers highlighted an unhealthy upbringing in families and schools.
"We need to guide them to behave in a responsible manner and this includes giving them proper information about reproductive health," said the Planned Parenthood Association (PKBI) is project manager, Guntoro Utamadi.
However, he admitted that it is a challenging task because the society and the authorities still think that teenagers should not know too much about sex as it would only encourage them to do it.
"Many people and even government officials play down the situation. They believe that if premarital sex exists the figure is insignificant," he said.
Head of Atmajaya University's research center, Irwanto explained that teenagers should be equipped with skills, besides basic education or vocational ones, to help them survive in a tough society.
He said that children who were not properly brought up could either develop certain weaknesses, like being persuaded easily, afraid of making mistakes, of being short tempered and though this doesn't necessarily translate into ignorance, they often prefer to remain silent, when they should be more critical about what is happening in their surroundings.
Worse still, behind this somber portrait lurks potential life threatening dangers. Reports stated that the number of children and teenagers contracting HIV/AIDS due to permissive sex and drug abuse is increasing.
It doesn't stop there. As sex-related issues are considered taboo and very little information on reproductive health are available, local teens are exposed to teen pregnancy, unsafe abortion, early marriage, genital mutilation, infertility, sexually transmitted diseases and even death.
No accurate data is available but the national data roughly put abortion at two million cases per year, and many teenagers resort to dangerous and painful methods to end their pregnancy by taking oral medications, rigorous massage, and inserting herbs or blunt objects into the uterus.
"The best protection teens can get from parents and teachers is parental guidance to stimulate them to act responsible. Also, parents an teachers need to improve their ways of approaching their teenagers," Irwanto said.
What parents need to do, he added, is to encourage teenagers to speak their mind, learn to say no, learn from mistakes, assess and accept consequences or deal with failures, qualities that are needed to sharpen teens life skills and make them more mature in various aspects of life, not only in reproductive health alone.
"They may become critical and would not hesitate to confront parents o teachers but these are nothing compared to the life-threatening risks that teenagers will encounter in real life," Irwanto explained.
He also said that the prim teaching methods in classrooms has failed t nurture teenagers' sense of responsibility because they act more like "horse blinders" that limit their perspective and only focus on obedience "Give them another tool to help them expand their perspective and they will know when to say 'no'," said Irwanto.
