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Once again Brazil is offering a simplistic solution for a serious problem plaguing young people and even adolescents: the high rate of precocious pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases. To resolve this, the government chose to place mechanic condom dispensers in the schools.
This is a simplistic attempt at a solution. The two problems stem from much more complex national and global facts. In the past few decades there has been a lessening of sexual prejudices and a consequent reduction in the age of sexual initiation. Brazil has become even more radicalized. The two problems are the natural consequence and must be faced immediately, but this must be done correctly with neither simplification nor illusions. The solution is not the mechanical ease of machines that distribute condoms. The solution is sex education for children and adolescents and the education of their parents. As a first condition, Brazilian children must stay in school until the age of 18. If the children leave school before age 14, as is happening in Brazil, there is no opportunity for sex education. If, like millions of children throughout Brazil, they never enter school, they will not have the opportunity for sex education. They must stay in school. Only with a serious bolsa-escola program, a school savings program and quality schools will it be possible for children to remain in school until their high school graduation. Today, many children are enrolled in school but do not attend. They go merely for the snack served. Now, they will go to receive condoms. As a second condition, specific sex-education courses must be given in the public and private schools. With those courses, the children will know how to use their own sexuality. They will have the resources to buy their own condoms or will be able to obtain them in the government health centers (SUS), or with their friends, aunts and uncles and parents. Without full consciousness of their sexuality, its pleasures and risks, Brazilian students will derive small or no benefit from the new little machines that dispense condoms. The dispensers may have the opposite effect, serving as an incentive for sex instead of an incentive for safe sax. The mechanical distribution does not have that educational dimension. It even causes a reduction in the age of sexual initiation. What's worse, some children may play with the condoms like balloons. Besides providing education for students, the government and society need to understand that there is a climate in Brazilian cultural life, especially on television, that serves as an incentive to precocious eroticism. Given this situation, the distribution of condoms is a "jeitinho," a Brazilian shortcut avoiding the fundamental causes of the problem. It employs the old logic of the superficial and even irresponsible quick fix. It is a way of transferring to the children and adolescents themselves responsibility for the solution to the problems that we, the Brazilian society, have created: education set aside; children out of school; eroticism induced from early childhood. Children and young people should take care when climbing on benches, should learn by themselves to use the little machines and should remember to use condoms. As if it were their problem alone and not one involving all of us, Brazil and the government. It is sad that these are not the only little machines offered to solve the great national problems - distributing condoms one day and accelerating growth another - while the true causes are not confronted. All with a profound disdain for the essential. Cristovam Buarque has a Ph.D. in economics. He is a PDT senator for the Federal District and was Governor of the Federal District (1995-98) and Minister of Education (2003-04). Last year he was a presidential candidate. You can visit his homepage - www.cristovam.com.br - and write to him at cristovam@senador.gov.br. Translated from the Portuguese by Linda Jerome - LinJerome@cs.com.
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Dark is the reality in Brazil, everywhere, whatever the subject you look at !
Just read more informations on your own country.......instead of watching your
Soap Opera TV ! In these movies...it is all fiction.
Wake up, stand up to the sad reality !
It is not in taking defense or taking more lightly than what reality is that your country
will move forward.
Every Brazilian should stand up and say....enough is enough...to their politicians and governments they elected !!!!!
Every Brazilian should point their fingers to those responsible.
Sadly, you re-elect them ! And you take their repeated promises as granted...while they are never delivered !!!!!