ABSTRACT
Through community action and concerted effort, AIDS came to the forefront of public attention. Information campaigns enabled people to acquire a reasonably good knowledge of the risks involved and the precautions to be taken. But whereas the first studies conducted among the general population (Dab et al., 1988; Aubigny et al., 1990) showed there to be adequate knowledge of how the disease is transmitted, the few studies conducted with teenagers, especially in the USA, revealed little correspondence between the degree of exposure to HIV and the precautions taken. McDonald et al. (1990), for example, observed that among US teenagers the number of sexual partners tended to be inversely proportional to the degree of regularity of condom use. Bowie and Ford (1989) and Hingson et al. (1990) presented similar findings. According to Binson et al. (1993), the systematic use of condoms with ‘secondary’ (sic) partners among middle-class young people aged 18 to 25 decreased as the number of partners increased. Only 14 per cent of persons with four or more partners used condoms systematically. Taking into account the sex of the respondents, Dickson et al. (1993) found that for girls condom use declined as the number of partners over the preceding twelve months increased, whereas for boys it remained constant. According to Durbin et al. (1993), 50 per cent of the young people not using condoms systematically had more than one partner, but this was the case with only 31 per cent of those using condoms systematically.
