HIV/AIDS Youth Awareness in Armenia
HIV/AIDS Awareness Class, School No. 43, Erebuni, Yerevan, Republic of Armenia © Onnik Krikorian / UNICEF 2005
Over at Armyouth, Pradafreak posts about a recent action aimed at raising awareness of the dangers of HIV/AIDS among youth in Armenia. The action was held on 12 December 2006 in cooperation with the APEC NGO who I wrote about for UNICEF in 2005. However, despite recent attempts to raise awareness, the action revealed that most young Armenians are uninformed about HIV/AIDs and especially with regards to how to prevent infection.
A lot of students from the faculty of sociology volunteered for the project, so we could manage it. Special mini - test forms were designed, and our volunteers asked those questions to the students. At the end of the questions the right answers were given to them, so they can read them after being intrigued from the questions.
So here are the results: Out of 916 surveys - Only 5% was fully informed about the case, 14% is enough informed about the issue, 73 % has a very little and wrong knowledge , 8% doesn’t have any idea about this big issue.
So as the results showed our students are not informed about the case, and I should admit they were not that interested in the presentation, some of them even thinks that its not a problem for the Armenian society, some girls found it offensive to answer to the questions about HIV / AIDs and STDs etc.
On 30 January, UNICEF released its report, Rapid Assessment and Response of HIV/AIDS among Especially Vulnerable Young People in the Republic of Armenia, which found that “Adolescents and young people aged 10-24 from vulnerable and high risk groups in Armenia have insufficient levels of knowledge to protect themselves from the spread of HIV/AIDS.”
Incidently, I wrote about the preparation of the UNICEF report here.
