title: The unintended consequences of sex education: an ethnography of a development intervention in Latin America.
abstract: This paper is an ethnography of a four-year, multi-disciplinary adolescent sexual and reproductive health intervention in Bolivia, Nicaragua and Ecuador. An important goal of the intervention--and of the larger global field of adolescent sexual and reproductive health--is to create more open parent-to-teen communication. This paper analyzes the project's efforts to foster such communication and how social actors variously interpreted, responded to, and repurposed the intervention's language and practices. While the intervention emphasized the goal of 'open communication,' its participants more often used the term 'confianza' (trust). This norm was defined in ways that might--or might not--include revealing information about sexual activity. Questioning public health assumptions about parent-teen communication on sex, in and of itself, is key to healthy sexual behavior, the paper explores a pragmatics of communication on sex that includes silence, implied expectations, gendered conflicts, and temporally delayed knowledge.
authors.affiliation: a Project CERCA, Center for Social Science and Global Health , University of Amsterdam , Amsterdam , the Netherlands.
authors.forename: Erica
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Nelson
authors.forename: Alexander
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Edmonds
authors.forename: Marco
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Ballesteros
authors.forename: Diana
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Encalada Soto
authors.forename: Octavio
authors.initials: O
authors.lastname: Rodriguez
mesh_terms: D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D060432:Anthropology, Medical; D001838:Bolivia / Q000208:ethnology; D003142:Communication; D004484:Ecuador / Q000208:ethnology; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D009527:Nicaragua / Q000208:ethnology; D010290:Parents / Q000523:psychology*; D000297:Psychology, Adolescent; D060728:Reproductive Health; D012736:Sex Education; D012725:Sexual Behavior / Q000208:ethnology / Q000523:psychology
keywords: Latin America; adolescent sexual and reproductive health; anthropology of development; open communication; parent–adolescent communication