Find in Blog
The Will and the Skill to Reduce Teen Pregnancy
According to the Central Statistical Office of the Ministry of Planning and the Economy, the teenage pregnancy rate in Trinidad and Tobago has not changed significantly over the last fifteen years. Nearly 1 in 6 young women becomes pregnant as a teen. Adolescence is a time when girls and boys learn to master a variety of developmental tasks in order to be ready to face the challenges of adulthood, and adolescent pregnancy creates nearly insurmountable barriers to those tasks.
Today, many young people are struggling to achieve mastery of crucial life skills. So many of them live in and attend schools in communities that don't support their needs. If we look beyond the numbers, we see teenagers living in poverty and overcrowded homes. We see young women for whom sex is linked with coercion, violence, and abuse. We see girls and boys being raised in a climate of domestic violence, child abuse, and neglect. All of these factor into the situation with teenage pregnancy in our country.
Traditional gender roles often trap young people and contribute to unhealthy relationships. Many girls who become pregnant say they believe they must prove their love by having sex with boys and men. Boys who have had no guidance on how to be secure in their gender and sexuality think they need to be sexually aggressive. What follows is risky sexual behaviors.
A survey conducted by the Family Planning Association of Trinidad and Tobago (FPATT), Tobago AIDS Society, and Caribbean Epidemiology Centre found that young people begin engaging in sexual activity as early as 10 years old, with the average age being fourteen. Another study on the sexual needs of youth in Tobago found that the average age of sexual initiation is 15 years old for girls and 13 years old for boys.
Across the Caribbean, researchers have shown that sexual activity often precedes sexual knowledge. Many adolescents don't know the health risks of early pregnancy, and they have many mistaken beliefs about sex and sexuality. One persistent myth is that girls cannot get pregnant the first time they have sex.
For more than forty years, FPATT has been addressing the sexual and reproductive health needs of adolescents using a holistic, rights-based, and gender-sensitive approach. We know comprehensive sexuality education works, and young people who have received accurate information tend to delay their first sexual experience compared with adolescents who have not had this education. We have seen this over and over again during our many years of providing sexuality education programs.
At our award-winning adolescent center in Port of Spain, Trinidad, young people can receive high-quality, confidential services that meet their sexual and reproductive health needs. This includes information, education, and counselling. Our youth center is complemented by a mobile health unit, which addresses the unique needs of out-of-school youth and visits more than 40 urban and rural communities annually.
The services we are currently providing are just a drop in the bucket of what is necessary to address the unmet need for comprehensive sexuality education and youth-friendly sexual and reproductive health services. Filling that gap is critical for reducing the high rate of teenage pregnancy in the country. FPATT has the will, the skill, and the know-how to reduce teenage pregnancy, and we stand ready to partner with the Ministries of Health and Education to fulfill this unmet need.