Family Life Education and Safer Sex: Perception and Attitude among Indian Adolescents

Ravisankar Kulasekaran, Annamalai University

With increases in teenage sexually transmitted diseases and HIV/AIDS pandemic, there is an increasing focus on reproductive education for this critical age group. Under this backdrop this study made an attempt to assess adolescent girls' knowledge, perceptions and attitudes towards life skill education, safer sex practice and STIs/HIV. Data were drawn from DLHS-III. Totally 94,122 late adolescent girls were interviewed. Logistic regression models have been used to estimate effect of covariates on opinion of introduction family life education, level of knowledge on mode of transmission and misconception on HIV/AIDS. Results indicate that though two-third of late adolescent rural girls were aware of family life education, only 41percent received it. Awareness of RTI/STI was less (25percent) than awareness of HIV/AIDS (67.9 percent). More than one-fifth had no accurate understanding about mode of HIV transmission. Only less than one-third believed using condom would protect against HIV infection (31.6percent).