A recent sexual health survey found that 49 per cent of university students across Canada did not use a condom during their last sexual encounter in the past year.
The study was conducted by Leger Marketing, surveying 1,500 students “to gain insight into the sexual health related experiences, knowledge and behaviours of young adult Canadians and to determine priority areas where their sexual health education needs improvement.”
It was commissioned by Trojan and developed in partnership with the Sex Information and Education Council of Canada (SIECCAN).
Alex McKay, research co-ordinator at SIECCAN, said the statistic concerning condom use was roughly consistent with past surveys of young Canadians.
McKay said there appears to be a knowledge gap between what students believe they know about sexual health, and what they actually know. Fifty-six per cent reported they are not concerned about contracting a sexually transmitted infection (STI).
“There is a lack of awareness around how common STIs are, or recognizing that the highest reportable rates of STIs in Canada are among precisely this age group,” McKay said.
He said there might be a knowledge gap concerning the degree of symptoms STIs may carry. McKay said during monogamous relationships, students might stop using condoms, perhaps because they switch to birth control pills.
There is “a tendency for university age people to think that if they are in a monogamous relationship with a healthy-looking partner, that they are at a very low risk for STIs,” he said.
“When we asked university students who did use condoms why they used them, they tended to say that they were using them as a form of birth control. When we asked students who were not using condoms why they weren’t using them, they tended to say ‘either myself or my partner uses another form of birth control.’”
McKay said it is common for students to have three to five relationship partners during university, meaning if they discontinued condom use in each case they would be a high risk for STIs.
One of the main surprises of the study was the reasoning behind lack of condom use, according to McKay.
“We expected a lot of them to say that condoms decreased pleasure, that a partner disliked using them, or that they interfered with intimacy—reasons like that which you hear quite commonly.”
But when pleasure levels were measured, McKay said most students did not rate sexual experiences with condoms as less pleasurable. He said it is not clear why females in committed relationships were exceptions to this.
Gina Parker, vice-president (student issues) of the Carleton University Students’ Association (CUSA), said CUSA provides condoms each year in its frosh kits and keeps them available in its University Centre office and service centres.
“We ordered under 10,000 from Ottawa Public Health,” Parker said via email. “They are supplied for free.”
She said the goal of providing condoms to students is to “promote safe sex.”
Other findings of the study showed that approximately one-quarter of students have never had any form of sex, and that condoms and the pill are students’ preferred methods of contraception.
Another finding demonstrated that 23 per cent of students believe a vaccine is now available to prevent HIV while 21 per cent did not know if one exists, despite there being no cure for HIV.
McKay said the findings are concerning and that better education for university students is needed surrounding the issues of sexual and reproductive health.
“It appears from the results of this study that many Canadian university students underestimate the risk [of STIs] and are jeopardizing their reproductive health as a result,” he said.
