Modernism’ in Higher Learning Institutions (HLIs): An overview of Students’ Vulnerability to HIV/AIDS

Abstract

For the last twenty years, HIV/AIDS has been found to be the most devastating disease ever in the history of mankind. It is now the leading cause of death in Sub-Saharan Africa (WHO, 2005). Tens of millions of children and young people are at the front line of the epidemics advance, bearing the burden of its impact. In a world where more than 11.7 million children and young people are living with HIV/AIDS protecting young productive people against the epidemic is requisite. According to UNAIDS (2004), an estimated 10.3 million people aged 15-24 (where the highest infection rate in Ethiopia is also concentrated in the 15 –24 age groups) are living with HIV/AIDS, and half of all new infections–over 7000 daily- are occurring among young people. It is also believed that most HIV infections in Ethiopia occur among young people in their teens and 20s, and young women are particularly vulnerable. They are vulnerable to HIV because of risky sexual behaviour, substance abuse and their lack of access to HIV information and prevention services. With the aforementioned realities, in Ethiopia, most of the students of Higher learning Institutions (HLIs) are young; usually within the ages between 15-24. Most of them are adolescents and join the institutions at times of active sexual ages when no close relatives, no parents as it was in the high school, no brothers and sisters to stay together, no cultural boundaries which bounded the individual to be limited, etc. Students, therefore, join new social and academic environments that can either positively or negatively affect their behaviour, attitude, etc and feel ‘free’ to do things which were not practiced before.In HLIs of Ethiopia, the notion of having boy friends for girls and girlfriends for boys has been common phenomena among youth and regarded as the characteristics of modernism♣. The nighttime sex films, the mannerless clothing styles of girls, the feeling of chauvinism of young boys by having sex with a beautiful girl, etc are fertile situations to realize unsafe sex and get vulnerable to HIV/AIDS. This paper, therefore, assesses to what extent the feeling of ‘modernism’ and facing new social environment made students of HLIs vulnerable to HIV infection. To this effect, and to best explore the issue; this study utilized the triangle of human health ecology model. It also tried to suggest appropriate strategies to fight HIV/AIDS in HLIs and ways on how to equip students with better information about the issue under discussion.