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August 2006 Monthly Monitor
Advocates for Youth's Youth of Color Initiative
Feature: Latina & Hispanic Young Women*
Many Latinas already possess critical resources, like family, community, culture, and their own abilities, that can support them in making good life decisions and healthy choices about sex. While research may tend to focus on troubling issues for Latinas, such as gang membership and widespread lack of health insurance, Latinas' development is better fostered by building on assets rather than focusing on problems. A focus on assets can promote self-esteem, self-efficacy, and hope for the future. By contrast, a focus on deficits can be demeaning, disempowering, and self-defeating.
The lessons learned from the research on Hispanic youth can and should be incorporated into programs for young Latinas, including those that address reproductive and sexual health. The following actions may help policy makers, program planners, health care providers, and Hispanic communities and community-based organizations to address reproductive and sexual health among young Latinas most effectively.
- Promote Appreciation of and Respect for Hispanic Cultures. Appreciating Hispanic cultures can support young Latinas in developing self-esteem and self-efficacy and in achieving a healthy future.
- Promote Cultural Competence. Cultural competence includes avoiding cultural generalizations, listening instead to people's social construction of their own ethnic identity, and working to understand the social realities that they face.
- Provide Parents with Support in Discussing Sexuality with Their Children and Youth. Schools and community-based organizations should offer workshops-in Spanish and English-on parent-child communication regarding sex.
- Provide Culturally Appropriate HIV/STI Prevention Education. Schools should provide HIV risk reduction training that addresses cultural aspects of health and health communication, acculturation, knowing one's partner's sexual history, condom use, and reducing the number of one’s new sexual partners.
- Provide School-Wide Support to Hispanic Students and Their Families. Both high schools and universities must work harder to break down language barriers and eradicate racism among faculty, staff, and students.
- Involve Youth in Designing Programs and Policies. Active youth involvement in designing and implementing programs can help assure that the programs effectively meet young Latinas'; needs.
- Involve Communities. Communities should offer programs to enhance cultural, ethnic, and racial awareness and understanding, as well as mentoring programs to ensure that teens have adult role models in their communities.
- Train Health Care Providers. Health care providers recognize the importance of understanding patients' cultural background, but many do not see themselves as being fully culturally competent.
- Make Family Planning Services Accessible. Accessible, low-cost or free family planning services may be essential to young Latinas' ability to make healthy decisions about sex.
- Design Culturally Appropriate Health Care Services and Public Information Campaigns. Latinas' strong sense of family identification and commitment to family support systems is an important factor to consider in designing health care programs for them.
* The above information is adapted from The Sexual Health of Latina Adolescents - Focus on Assets. To view the full version, please visit: http://www.advocatesforyouth.org/publications/frtp/latina.htm
Capacity Building & Professional Development
Online Coverage of the XVI International AIDS Conference: In partnership with the International AIDS Society, kaisernetwork.org is pleased to be the official webcaster of the XVI International AIDS Conference (AIDS 2006), providing you with access to the daily developments that take place at the conference in Toronto, Canada this August.
Kaisernetwork.org will issue a Daily Update email, sent during the week, August 14-18, of the conference, which will include a summary of and access to each day's online coverage. You can sign up to receive the email at http://www.kaisernetwork.org/aids2006.
If your organization is interested in making the conference coverage available to its constituency through its Web site or listservs, please visit http://www.kaisernetwork.org/aids2006/syndication.cfm for more information about our free content-sharing options.
Funding Opportunities
NetAid Global Action Awards: Honorees receive $5,000 for college or a charitable cause of their choice. The Awards celebrate young people who have shown great leadership in areas such as preventing HIV and AIDS, alleviating hunger, and improving access to education. Eligible honorees are high school students in the U.S. who have organized and led a project that has impacted people in poor countries, or raised awareness about global poverty in their own communities. The application deadline is 11/30/2006. For more information, please visit: please visit: http://www.netaid.org/global_action_awards/
Announcements
2006 National Health Summit Latina Leaders for Health, to be held September 6-8th 2006 in Washington DC, will be a historic gathering of decision-makers and activists from the public private sectors and direct service providers of healthcare. The Summit is a model strategy of cooperation between corporate America, the government, and national leadership/advocacy organizations.
The Summit seeks to:
- Move forward a public policy/service agenda that improves the Latina/o community's health and quality of life.
- Create a solid foundation of information on Latinas - capturing the critical nuances and complexities of the various Latina/o populations. Promote a forward-thinking health agenda for Latinas and their families.
- Produce a National Latina Health Agenda culminating out of the five U.S. regional symposia held in 2004-05 and focused on the following health priorities:
- Diabetes
- Cardiovascular Disease
- Cancer
- HIV/AIDS
- Substance Abuse/Tobacco Use
- Mental Health/Violence
- Maternal and Child Health
For more information, please visit: http://www.nlhn.net
Research Results: High-Risk Subgroups for Teens at Risk for HIV
Findings: Teens who engage in unsafe sex exhibit different patterns of behavior, with some subgroups at a significantly higher risk of HIV infection than others.
Background: To determine whether it is possible to characterize different subgroups among at-risk youth, Dr. Christopher D. Houck of the Bradley/Hasbro Children's Research Center in Providence, R.I., and colleagues surveyed 1,153 people ages 15-21 who reported having unprotected sex in the past 90 days. Three distinct subgroups were found among boys: those who had mental health crises and frequently engaged in unprotected sex (10 percent of males); those who used alcohol and marijuana and had unprotected sex (about half the group); and a lower-risk group that engaged in unprotected sex less frequently. Boys in the first group averaged about 27 unprotected sex acts in the past 90 days, compared to about 19 for the second group and seven for the third group.
Risk factors were different for girls. Fourteen percent reported having had unprotected sex 64 times in the past 90 days, though they did not report heavy drug and alcohol use or mental health crises. Eleven percent reported 13 acts of unprotected sex during the past 90 days and higher drug and alcohol use and more mental health crises. The remaining 75 percent of girls reported about eight events of unprotected sex and did not report heavy substance use or mental health crises.
The findings suggest that prevention programs tailored to the needs of these subgroups could be more apt to succeed. "If we can develop programs to target adolescents' sexual risk in the context of having mental health crises, or also using substances, those are the ways that we're more likely to have an effect on their risk behavior," said Dr. Houck.
The study, "'Islands of Risk': Subgroups of Adolescents at Risk for HIV," was published in the Journal of Pediatric Psychology (2006;31(6):619-629).
Resources
For Resources on young women of color, please check out the following:
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