Poll Shows Petersburgers Too Casual About Safe Sex

By Galina Stolyarova

The St. Petersburg Times

Published: August 8, 2012 (Issue # 1721)

ALEXANDER BELENKY / SPT Many respondents said they ‘forgot’ or ‘didn’t care’ about contraception during casual sex when under the influence of alcohol.

Seventy percent of St. Petersburgers aged between 16 and 35 do not use any form of contraception when having casual sex, according to the results of a nationwide sociological poll conducted earlier this month by NewsEffector and PN Reader monitoring agencies.

The poll of 3,700 individuals between the ages of 16 and 50 was conducted in 36 Russian cities.

The percentage of those that fail to use a condom or other forms of protection during casual sex in St. Petersburg is slightly higher than the national average of 63 percent. According to the poll, residents of large Russian cities tend to care less about using contraception than in more provincial areas. The report shows that cities with the highest numbers of those who did not use contraception — more than 70 percent of respondents — were discovered in Moscow, Yekaterinburg, Sochi, Chelyabinsk, Nizhny Novgorod, Samara, Volgograd, Krasnoyarsk, Novokuznetsk, Voronezh and Krasnodar.

According to Sergei Moroz, the director of NewsEffector, St. Petersburg finds itself in the “medium” group, where between 60 and 70 percent of respondents do not use contraception. A similar situation was found in Vladivostok, Khabarovsk, Tula, Ryazan, Kemerovo, Saratov, Ulyanovsk, Barnaul, Orenburg, Penza and Astrakhan.

Only around 37 percent of those polled nationwide said they always use some form of contraception. By contrast, 63 percent of Russians said they “did not care” or “forgot about” contraception, with the main reasons being that the encounter was a “spontaneous experience” or that they were under the influence of alcohol.

Even in the cities that ranked as some of the safest for contraception, such as Kazan, Irkutsk, Yaroslavl, Tymen, Ufa, Perm, Omsk and Novosibirsk, at least 50 percent of those polled admitted to not using contraception.

33 percent nationwide confessed to having had sex with someone they had just met while under the influence of alcohol. Eighty percent of such cases involved unprotected sex, according to the agency. In St. Petersburg, 43 percent of respondents admitted to having had such an encounter.

“Let’s face it: The vast majority of young people in Russia leave sexual safety up to chance,” Moroz said. “Since this attitude is so widespread, the risks for the population are staggering. The potential of spreading HIV, hepatitis C and other highly dangerous sexually transmitted diseases is huge.”

Moroz blames much of young people’s ignorance regarding safe sex on the state. “Neither Russian television, nor other media outlets show any social advertisements promoting safe sex. While in Western Europe awareness campaigns complete with free condom distribution programs in bars and clubs frequented by young people are commonplace, in Russia they [campaigns] are hardly heard of. Even installing vending machines selling condoms in public restrooms seems to be a problem.”

These unsettling results that show an obvious lack of awareness concerning sexually transmitted diseases among young people were released amidst fierce criticism from Vitaly Milonov, head of the legislative committee of the St. Petersburg Legislative Assembly and the man behind the city’s controversial gay propaganda law, against the state-funded Yuventa Center. The center offers lessons educating teenagers about safe sex. The lessons are given at Yuventa offices, as well as at schools. Milonov, a member of United Russia, branded such lessons, during which psychologists often demonstrate how to properly use a condom, “immoral.”

“When the city parliament reconvenes in September, we should bring up the issue of ending state funding for Yuventa,” Milonov said. “With their lessons they encourage an unhealthy and premature interest in sex in children — they even offer abortions to teenage girls — all at the expense of the state. This is not acceptable.”

However, Svetlana Agapitova, the St. Petersburg children’s ombudsman, supported Yuventa and what it does, stressing that “it is a good thing that teenagers have a center where there are competent doctors and psychologists that they can rely on in a crisis.”

The controversy concerning Yuventa is all the more surprising considering the fact that the vast majority of young people who contract HIV in Russia are infected as a result of unprotected sex. The leaflets distributed at Yuventa emphasize that “it is high time everyone assumed full responsibility for their own health and well-being, especially concerning things as simple and straight-forward as getting a condom.”

According to official statistics, 64 percent of pregnancies in Russia end in abortion. In Western Europe under 25 percent of pregnancies are terminated and in the U. K. this figure is between ten and 15 percent.

Official statistics state that there are 400,000 HIV-positive people in Russia, while independent experts say the numbers have already exceeded 1 million. Between 110 and 120 new cases are registered in the country every day.

St. Petersburg has some of the highest numbers of HIV-positive people in the country. Since 2002, between 3,000 and 4,500 new cases have been registered in the city annually. According to the St. Petersburg City Center for AIDS Prevention, nearly 47,000 HIV-positive people had registered in St. Petersburg as of January 2012. Over 38,000 HIV-positive people had registered in Moscow.