YOUNG IRISH adults are more likely to use condoms, even after binge drinking, when engaging in casual sexual encounters while away on holidays than they are when having casual sex at home.
The finding, from research carried out at the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland (RCSI), suggests that abuse of alcohol can not be blamed as the sole reason why many young people engage in unprotected sex. Rather, it may often be used as an excuse for such behaviour.
According to Dr Gráinne Cousins, health psychologist and researcher in the division of population health sciences at the RCSI, those who believe they will behave irresponsibly when they have drink taken are more likely to be the ones who end up behaving in this way and having unprotected sex. Therefore, health promotion messages should probably be targeting these beliefs, which seem to become self-fulfilling prophesies, when trying to get the safe sex message across.
“Those people who believed they were more likely to take sexual risks with drink on them actually took risks,” she said.
“Therefore, if we just give the message that alcohol causes you to have risky sex we endorse the belief that some people hold or create that belief in other people . . . we should target people probably before they start drinking,” she said.
The research, she added, indicated that the relationship between alcohol and risky behaviour was more complicated than people may have thought.
Dr Cousins’s study on condom use was carried out among a nationally representative sample of 19-31 year olds.
It found 88 per cent of those who partook in binge drinking and casual sex while abroad on holidays used a condom, whereas just 70 per cent of those having casual sexual encounters at home after binge drinking used condoms.
“It strikes me that people consider a foreigner more risky and even though they are drunk they manage to protect themselves more when away from home . . . what’s worrying is what are they basing this on . . . when at home they may think I know what school he went to, what he works at and so on – but these factors have absolutely nothing to do with whether somebody has a sexually transmitted infection .”
The study also found that only 56 per cent of those who were in steady relationships – even if only for a few months – used condoms even though more than 60 per cent of them were unaware of their partner’s STI status.
Dr Cousins pointed out that many of these may be putting themselves at risk and the figures are bearing this out. She said some 65 per cent of STIs reported in the State in 2006 were among young people.
While the average age of those studied was 24 years, the average number of sexual partners they had already was 8.5.
In addition, the study found that, overall, alcohol was more likely to result in people engaging in casual sex. Some 70 per cent of casual sexual encounters at home were reported to have involved alcohol consumption and more than half of these involved binge drinking.
On the other hand, 89 per cent of casual sexual encounters while abroad on holidays involved alcohol consumption and even more of these – more than four-fifths of them – involved binge drinking.
The research, funded by the Health Research Board, is one of a number of studies which will be presented tomorrow at the annual RCSI research day.