Study: Pre-teens at risk from HIV

BARCELONA, Spain, July 11 (UPI) -- As many as one in four African-American pre-teens is already thinking about having sex, a researcher said Thursday at the 14th International AIDS Conference.

"We don't think of 10-year-olds as thinking about sex," said sociologist Kim Miller of the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta, "but 25 percent are."

Miller said the findings, based on early results from a study called Parents Matter, mean even pre-teens may be at risk of becoming infected with HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, and need information and prevention programs aimed directly at them.

"We can't miss the boat on this," Miller told United Press International. "We know that prevention works best before risky behavior starts."

The good news, Miller told an audience, is that very few of the pre-teens surveyed are actually having sex -- just 7 out of 571 youngsters aged between 9 and 12 years. The average age of the youngsters was just over 10, she said.

"They're having to make decisions about sex earlier than ever before," Miller said.

The finding is not surprising, said psychologist and sex educator Cydelle Berlin, of St. Luke's-Roosevelt Hospital Center in New York. "Most people still think of people 10, 11, and 12 as still living in a child's world," she told UPI. "But they're not."

Berlin said young people are bombarded with sexual messages from the media and the Internet, but pre-teens do not get the information they need to deal safely and wisely with that barrage. "Shocking as it is," she said, "the message here is we need to give them the skills so they can deal with it."

The Parents Matter study is called a randomized trial, in which parents families that enroll are given either five intensive sessions on parenting skills and how to communicate with their children, a single session, or general health counseling.

The goal is to see which approach works best to prevent risky behavior as the children grow up, Miller said. The study was sparked more than a year ago, when the Congressional Black Caucus sounded the alarm about the soaring rate of HIV infections among African-Americans, Miller said.

"We get 40,000 new infections every year, and the majority are in African-American populations," Miller said. If the approach proves successful, she said, it may be applied to other groups. The data she released Thursday were taken from interviews with children of some of the first families to enroll in the study.

Most of the children either do not think about sex or think about it rarely, Miller said. But 11 percent said they thought they were ready to have sex and 14 percent said it was "probably true" that they would have sex within the next year.