Books Aid AIDS Decay

For many parents, the general consensus is that their children don’t need to know about the birds and the bees until the kids are having kids of their own—forty years in the future. However, sexual education is a required course in public schools, with the idea being that educating kids is better than letting them run around ignorant.
In Uganda, the government is taking a unique approach to Sex Ed. Uganda used to have the highest Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) rate in the world, with 20% of the population infected. Now the infection rate is 6.7%. One has to wonder if Uganda’s success can be attributed to its novel form of education—graphic books about unsafe sex resulting in HIV and Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS). These books don’t seem too shocking at first, until you consider that their target audience is children.
While more conservative citizens are not quite comfortable with allowing children access to these books, some parents in Uganda have embraced them. They know that this kind of material has to be discussed to educate their children.
The concept of these books is not so different from U.S. Sex Ed classes. I doubt that having us watch a video of a woman giving birth is merely intended to enlighten young girls—it’s intended to scare us into not having sex. So why not educate your children with tales of the consequences of unsafe sex? After all, even an adult would be scarred after reading about a twelve-year-old girl being raped and getting AIDS and then dying—you might as well scare them when they’re young.
Despite the reservations there may be about these books, one has to admit that they’ve proven to be effective. Uganda has prevented countless infections, and this type of educational material has helped.
Though it may seem wrong to expose children to this kind of information, it may save their lives. After all, society exposes children to sex and risky conduct in the media everyday—we might as well expose them to the consequences of such behavior instead of treating teenage promiscuity as just part of American culture.
Catherine Chiang,
Opinions Editor