Students Produce AIDS Talk Geared to Colleges

Two Dartmouth University seniors sit in front of a large gathering and talk about topics once relegated to whispers, if discussed at all, by college students.

But here, in a mid-Manhattan hotel conference room full of health educators, they demonstrate a role-playing method they have used at their Ivy League school in New Hampshire and other campuses to teach sexually active students to avoid AIDS.

In one example, a young man and woman decide that they are not ready to have a sexual relationship. In another, having recently met, they awkwardly broach the issue of condoms, which can prevent infection with the AIDS virus and other sexually transmitted diseases.

The acquired immune deficiency syndrome virus, spread most often through sexual intercourse and shared intravenous drug equipment, is slowly being recognized as a threat to college students experimenting with sex and drugs.

Using Borrowed Equipment

“If you are first experimenting with intravenous drugs, you are probably borrowing the equipment,” AIDS expert Dr. June Osborne said.

“And I would call campuses hotbeds of heterosexual activity,” she said in a telephone interview from the University of Michigan, where she is dean of the School of Public Health.

These conditions combine to increase the chances that a college student could be infected with the virus, she said.

The four-member group called RAID, Responsible AIDS Information at Dartmouth, uses role-playing as part of a road show that they have taken to other schools, such as Harvard University and Wisconsin’s Beloit College, since introducing it last semester to sororities, fraternities and other groups at Dartmouth.

“We use specific types of college issues, like if you take someone home with you tonight to your bedroom, how do you talk about whether you’re going to have sex and use a condom?” RAID member Jim Bramson said.

Choice Given Legitimacy

The decision in one example not to have sex helps give that choice legitimacy, said Bramson, acknowledging peer pressure to be sexually active.

The 21-year-old Philadelphia native said he and three friends began RAID in response to the lack of AIDS education for college students. They have used public service announcements and posters in addition to dramatization to get the message across.

Each school needs to tailor its own campaign and persist with it, said Bramson, stressing that “it can’t just be a one-shot deal.”

One health educator has warned that campuses are in danger of becoming breeding grounds for AIDS among heterosexual students, who could pass the virus through sexual contact within their communities as small numbers of gay men inadvertently did early in the epidemic.

“The numbers are similar to those among the gay population in 1981, at the very beginning of the epidemic” said Rodger MacFarlane, director of New York City’s AIDS Professional Education.

He also urged innovative sex education efforts, saying: “We know information doesn’t change behavior by itself. We must teach health educators new skills to save lives.”

Because AIDS infections may not become evident for up to seven years after they occur, many people now developing the deadly disease may have been infected in their late teens and early 20s.

AIDS is the leading cause of death among men ages 25 to 44 and among women 25 to 34 in New York City, which remains at the center of the epidemic, with 13,800 of the nation’s total 58,270 cases as of early this month.

Complicated Problem

After viewing the RAID performance, Dr. Stephen Joseph observed that studies have found that 60% of Americans are sexually active by age 17.

“The problem is complicated because of the sensitive issues of sex and drugs that surround AIDS. Yet with information and education our only current effective tools (against infection), we must put aside embarrassment and fear of talking about sex and face the problems of AIDS honestly and explicitly,” said Joseph, who is the health commissioner of New York City.

From Howard University in Washington, Dr. Wayne Greaves, professor of infectious diseases, said AIDS should be a particular concern at colleges in regions with large AIDS caseloads and with high numbers of minorities, who have been found to have higher rates of AIDS virus infection.

Yet, like at many other schools, AIDS prevention efforts on Howard’s campus, said Greaves, are “embryonic.”