Red Cross Developing AIDS Game to Show Fatal Risk of Unsafe Sex

The Red Cross, which brought Americans swimming lessons and resuscitation for heart-attack victims, is developing a game to help fight AIDS by teaching children about the consequences of unsafe sex.

“The Red Cross sees this game as a natural extension of its response to a critical health emergency,” said Sandra Grymes, manager of health services for the American Red Cross in Greater New York.

“It’s a game that is directed toward teen-agers and young adults to help them process information about AIDS and understand that they have some control over their behaviors in relationship to the disease,” Grymes said. “It seeks to educate people about the risks of their behavior.”

The game, called At Risk, was conceived by Irene Katcher, an administrator at Junior High School 80 in the Bronx borough of New York--where, she said, the students don’t say no to anything.

“You’ve got to give a kid a reason to say no,” said Katcher, 40, a former science teacher who is discipline dean for the seventh grade.

“It’s a lot easier to form attitudes than to change them, and people don’t want to say no to things that are fun,” she said. “Research in this area has shown that saying no to sex doesn’t work, once people discover it.”

In the game--to be conducted by a trained health professional in a classroom environment--players use dice, cards and a “Sexual Wheel of Misfortune” to develop “life styles” and sexual histories that can lead to simulated death from the incurable disease.

As of late last year about 325 of every 100,000 people in the area served by the school had acquired immune deficiency syndrome, Katcher said.

The U.S. Public Health Service has estimated that as many as 1.5 million people in the country were infected and at least 45,000 Americans had died of AIDS by the end of 1988.

Although most of the U.S. victims have been male homosexuals and people who share needles when they inject drugs, the percentage of those who transmit the virus through heterosexual sex is small but increasing, according to a report in Scientific American magazine.

Infected Drug Addicts

More than 60% of the drug addicts in New York City have the AIDS virux, and it’s probably much higher than that, Katcher said.

“You can carry AIDS for up to 14 years, possibly longer, without showing any symptoms at all,” Katcher said. “If you have the AIDs virus in your body, you’re a walking time bomb. You’re going to die. You don’t know when, but it’s going to happen.”

The development, testing and distribution of the game is being done under a $20,000 grant from the federal Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta through the Red Cross under Katcher’s supervision.

“It’s a simulation that’s built for a group of 20 or more. I don’t believe the game would be effective with less,” Katcher said.

Why a game?

“I’ve been in the teaching business a long time. Telling people is one thing. Nobody likes to be told anything, and sitting in a lecture listening to statistics is boring. You’re not involved.

“Instead of it being boring, instead of it being preachy, we get to run you through a real-life situation.”

The major goal of the game, Katcher said, is to demonstrate to young people that each time they have sex, in effect, they are having sex with all the previous partners of their current partner.

The game starts with all players breaking up into couples. Each couple rolls a special cube, which has three sides marked “sex,” two labeled “abstain” and one indicating a monogamous relationship.

Sexual Histories

After recording their partner’s name and the outcome of the dice roll on a score sheet, the couples split up and everyone takes a new partner and they roll again. This happens at least four times, with the score sheets becoming sexual histories of each player.

Then each player is dealt a card, with one getting a card marked AIDS and the rest getting “I’m OK for Now” cards.

The AIDS recipient goes to the front of the room and is joined by all his or her past sex partners. They are then joined by all their past sex partners, creating a pool of potential AIDS victims.

Those players then draw cards indicating either “safe sex”--the use of condoms or spermicides--or “It can’t happen to me”--an attitude that results in AIDS transmission.

Only those players who practice “safe” sex can avoid AIDS, but they still have to overcome the 1-in-10 odds that even those practices are not totally safe. Those odds are reflected in the “Sexual Wheel of Misfortune,” which is 90% red and 10% green. Those players who spin “green” are the only winners. The rest get AIDS and wind up in the front of the room.

“That’s where you go to die,” Katcher says.