Pregnancy tops list of fears for SA students

SOUTH African university students are more scared of becoming pregnant than contracting HIV.

A report compiled by sex expert Dorothy Black in collaboration with research company Amoeba Insights, to be released today, reveals that students use contraceptives for the “prevention of pregnancy more than . . . sexually transmitted infections”.

In the survey for Student Village, an online social networking and marketing organisation, 3 040 students from 21 higher education institutions were questioned. The respondents felt that “nowadays there are antiretroviral [ ARV] drugs you can take . . . [but] if you fall pregnant that changes your life forever”.

Student Village CEO Ronen Aires, a youth marketing specialist, said students were generally driven by fear.

“They act to seek pleasure and avoid pain. The pain of a few years ago was that everyone was worried about Aids. Now, we’ve seen the shift and the biggest fear they have is making their partner pregnant,” Aires said.

He said this was despite years of on-campus HIV/Aids awareness campaigns by the government and nongovernmental organisations.

“They see [pregnancy] as a terminal sentence. If they had to contract Aids, they could take ARVs and they’d be fine. That’s their view,” Aires said.

Ramneek Ahluwalia, director of the Higher Education HIV/Aids Programme, said the right message was not reaching students.

“Young girls on Monday mornings are standing in long queues at campus clinics asking for a morning-after pill or a contraceptive because they had unprotected sex,” Ahluwalia said. Other findings include:

A staggering 22% of female students said they had been sexually assaulted, and 11% of all students said their first sexual encounter was not consensual; and

Many black students viewed forced sex as rape only if it was violent, brutal or abusive, and that non-consensual sex could not be regarded as rape if it happened in a relationship. Respondents referred to “mini-rape” instead.

Lisa Vetten, senior researcher for the Tshwaranang Legal Advocacy Centre, which deals with violence against women, said the report indicated “just how accepted the use of violence is in intimate relationships”.

Yandisa Sikweyiya, a specialist scientist at the gender and health research unit at the Medical Research Council, said there was a “dominant discourse and understanding” among young men that they were entitled to sex from their girlfriends.

Sikweyiya said young men believed it was normal to pressure women to agree to sex and use physical force if necessary, because women were expected to offer some resistance before they gave in.

“Sexual entitlement is another huge issue . . . young men believe they have a right to have sex with their partners whenever they feel like it and they have an expectation that the partners should be available for them sexually,” Sikweyiya said.

A report by the Higher Education HIV/Aids Programme published in 2010 showed that about 3.8% of students in South Africa were HIV-positive.