Durex Observatory: alarming data on young people and sexuality

Also this year Durex has created, in collaboration with Skuola.net, the Sexual Education Observatory: a statistical survey, carried out on a sample of over 15,000 young people between 11 and 24 years of age, which made it possible to investigate the relationship of pre-adolescents and adolescents with sexuality and affectivity. The first data of the study that will be presented next October are alarming. There is still very little use of condoms (49%), further decreasing compared to previous years (2018, 57%; 2019, 53%), and with an even lower figure if we take as a sample young people aged 19 and 24 years old (44%), towards whom the Sexual Health Month initiative is aimed. On the sidelines of the presentation of “Sextember – The Month of Sexual Health”, Laura Savarese, Regulatory Affairs Director Southern Europe Reckitt, explains: “Durex has always been involved in education and training programs. We are a brand very close to young people and this is why we strongly feel the responsibility to bring educational content both through our social channels with a light-hearted tone, sometimes a little irreverent, but always aimed at promoting the culture of awareness, and also by inserting ourselves in a more formal and institutional context, hoping to be able to adapt Italy to the rest of European countries by bringing affective and sexual education interventions into the ministerial curriculum. “Something is beginning to move in Italy too, but there are other goals to be achieved:” they are already doing a lot, an example is the new law that last year freed communication on condoms in Italy, recognizing it as a precious tool for spreading a culture of awareness and prevention in the sexual field – continues Savarese -. We hope to be able to associate the communicative power of our brand with training and education interventions that are also conducted by the institutions, in partnership, in order to obtain a synergistic result. We also hope that institutions can continue to work in order to make love and sexual education courses compulsory, as is already the case in almost all other European countries, and that they contribute to reinforcing, in addition to the role of the school, also the role of the family. It is important that parents – he concludes – have the right tools to support their children in acquiring full awareness of the need to obtain a positive state of sexual health but also prevention from risks and contagion “.