A large proportion of adolescents are suffering from STDs and young girls become pregnant and very young mothers. Given the increase in teenage pregnancies and the consequences on quality of life of these persons, an intervention, including programs of primary prevention, individual therapy and group therapy is needed in primary schools.
Before intervening, it is essential to understand the underlying factors for early sex and unprotected leading to unwanted pregnancies and STDs among adolescents. These risk factors include individual characteristics of adolescents as well as environmental factors.
Individual characteristics of adolescents - Teenagers are generally looking for thrills. They seek pleasure and danger of attempting to explore the world by taking various risks, such as abuse of drugs or alcohol, school failure, dropping out, violence and unprotected sexual activity. Some provisions may explain why these risky behaviors are part of their lives.
Firstly, adolescents have little ability to design the future and anticipate the consequences of their actions. This gap causes a decrease in their motivation to make realistic career choices and to take measures necessary to succeed academically.
Second, adolescents also maintain several stereotyped beliefs and erroneous. They think, for example, that safe sex is not as nice or that there is no risk of pregnancy or STDs if they wash immediately after. Moreover, this leads to neglect behaviors related to the feeling of being untouchable. Indeed, the most widespread belief among adolescents is that events as unfortunate as disease and pregnancy can happen to them. Finally, adolescents often manifest embarrassment and shame when confronted with information about contraception or sexuality.
Finally, one last feature makes adolescents at risk due to the fact that pregnancy and motherhood are seen as signs of independence and detachment from their own parent.Ironically, the emotional and financial dependence usually increases during pregnancy and following childbirth.
Environmental Factors - These factors relate to education, family values and socio-economic influence sexual activity.Among these, poverty comes first. Indeed, several authors reported that young women with low economic status showed little motivation to avoid pregnancy and then have less recourse to abortion than those from wealthy families. Adolescents often perceive pregnancy as a way of escaping the vicious circle of poverty.
A second environmental factor is the ethnic background of adolescents. In the United States, nearly 20% of African women aged between 15 and 19 become pregnant each year. Compared with Hispanic and adolescents of European origin, the African use less effective contraceptive.In addition, adolescent Hispanic and African tend to carry their pregnancy to term (over 50% of cases), while those of European origin have abortions in more than 60% of cases.
Moreover, several studies report that Hispanics are less concerned about the danger of becoming pregnant, compared to other girls. It seems that a positive attitude towards early pregnancy contributes to increase the pregnancy rate for this population, culturally speaking.