Clap your hands say 'no thank you'

"I'm worried about catching something," says Laura. We're sitting at a cafe having a coffee and a catch-up on a lazy Sunday afternoon.

Laura has been seeing a guy she met at the gym a few weeks before and they've just started having sex. She's 23, well educated, on the pill, has had two or three previous partners, and she is constantly worried about the possible consequences of starting a relationship with a guy from outside her regular social circle.

“He wants me to go down on him, but I'm really concerned. I can't exactly ask him to wear a condom for that, he'll get offended. It’s hard enough to convince him to use one for sex.”

In the 90s the Australian media was all over the HIV/AIDS epidemic. Anyone old enough would remember the TV ad campaign highlighting the fact that every new sexual encounter exposes you everyone they have slept with and everyone those people have slept with. But it seems that, with new cases of HIV spiking in a recent report by researchers at the University of New South Wales, we might be ignoring the famous adage: no glove, no love.

Reported cases of STIs are on the rise across the board in Australia. As Jill Michelson, general manager of operations for Australia at Marie Stopes – an organisation that provides sexual and reproductive healthcare around the world – explained to TheVine, condom use in this country is generally acknowledge to have fallen out of fashion.

“Unfortunately contraception, particularly the use of condoms, has dropped off as far as our youth are concerned,” she said. “We know that the third national survey of Australian secondary students on HIV/AIDS and sexual health found that the majority of Year 12 students are quite sexually active and nearly half of those students admitted that they don’t use condoms every time they have sex. About one in 10 stated that they never use condoms.”

A large part of the problem lies in the culture surrounding the use of condoms and the way young people in particular feel about discussing sexual health with their partners. “There is an issue, particularly with women talking to their partners about using condoms,” Michelson continued. “They have a reluctance to request that their partner uses a condom and we’ve found consistent in a number of studies.

“Where STIs are concerned it’s not only HIV that has increased in Australia – most notifications have increased. The most concerning one is Chlamydia, because that is an infection that in most instances doesn’t present any symptoms and so people can have the infection for quite some time without realising it.”

Reported cases of Chlamydia rose from 17,000 in 2000 to a whopping 50,000 cases in 2007. Half of those cases were in the 15-24 age group.

On the up side, the increase is partly attributed to better screening, although whilst more people are taking responsibility for their own sexual health, men remain less likely to get tested than women, and of course, prevention is always better than cure.

“A lot more that that needs to be done in terms of educating men, in particular, about getting proper screening done,” Michelson considered. “In terms of women, they need to get onto their partners and demand that they have screening done on a regular basis.

“It is really still a problem within our community and there are still stigmas attached to talking about sexual health. We often hear people say, ‘Oh, it won’t happen to me! I wasn’t intending to have sex. I wasn’t intending to get into a relationship’? People forget, too, that they can still get STIs through oral sex and quite often don’t use condoms for that.”

According to a global survey conducted by condom company Durex, 54% of Australians admit to having had sex without knowing their partner’s sexual history. This is despite that 56% reporting that they are most concerned about catching HIV/AIDS.

If you need advice on how to approach the subject with your partner or on getting tested, try sextxt.com.au