THE EMAIL was from a wigged-out mom I know well.
She was appalled that the city's campaign to reduce sexually transmitted diseases allows kids as young as 11 to get free condoms via mail-order from the Public Health Department. Eleven!
Go to the website www.takecontrolphilly.org and see for yourself. Be warned: The site contains very straightforward info, including explicit animations illustrating the proper way to don or insert a condom.
"Every girl is different," the website notes in its instructions on female-condom use. "Figure out what position works for you. You can stand with one foot on a chair, sit on the edge of a chair, lie down, squat, or for fun, have your partner help you out."
The idea of an 11-year-old reading this makes me want to cry.
"As a parent, I am personally outraged," wrote my friend, who has a 14-year-old. "What's the back story on this campaign? What is it telling our youth? I get the sex-education thing for kids in schools, but mail-order condoms for 11-year-olds??? It's shocking to me."
We don't know the half of what's going on out there.
Depress us, Gary Bell.
"We do more workshops in middle schools than in high schools," says Bell, executive director of Bebashi-Transition to Hope, the local nonprofit that works on prevention of HIV and other sexually transmitted diseases. "Teachers call us because their kids are acting out sexually. They'll catch them in the bathroom or the stairwell. They hear that kids are cutting schools to have orgies."
Good Lord. Orgies?
"Yes, indeed," says Bell. "It's sad. It's horrifying."
But no longer startling to those on the front lines of adolescent sexuality.
"We follow 200 teenagers with HIV, and the youngest is 12," says Jill Foster, director of the Dorothy Mann Center for Pediatric and Adolescent HIV at St. Christopher's Hospital for Children. "When we started doing HIV treatment in 1998, the average age of patients was 16 or 17. The first time we got a 13-year-old was mind-blowing."
Now, Foster and her colleagues barely twitch when a child barely in his or her teens tests positive for HIV.
Because a recent report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has identified Philadelphia as having the earliest age of sexual initiation - 13 - among cities participating in the study, she says, it's crucial to make condoms available to younger kids.
People gasp at that, says Foster, who diagnoses new HIV cases at a rate of two to three teens a month, up from one every four months just a decade ago.
