Building a Culture of Trust or Surrendering to a Culture of Suspicion

An article in YOUTHink (Monday 28 Aug 2006) featured the heartbreaking story of a young girl who was infected with HIV by her boyfriend.My thoughts and prayers go out to her and her boyfriend. I sincerely hope that family, friends and society at large will not treat her as a pariah and avoid her, but rather reach out in kindness and understanding.When tragedy strikes, people of good will are naturally concerned. Indeed, I would imagine that the suggestions offered by Mr. Justin Ng and Mr. Vanan Pillay in the article on how best to prevent such tragedies from occurring again reflects their genuine care for people and their well being. Indeed, Mr. Ng and Mr. Pillay’s suggestions seem very logical. Since there are a significant number of young people who are sexually active, educating them on safe sex practices would ensure that their risk of being infected with an STI would decrease. Yet I would think that if we adopt Mr. Ng and Mr. Pillay’s suggestions that we should “trust no one” and that we should debunk the myth that “if they run around within their usual social circles, they’re safe from infection”, we would be inevitably building a culture of suspicion which would in the final analysis spell the end of any meaningful human relationships.Proponents of the message of safe sex (or more accurately safer sex since the condom reduces but does not eliminate the risk of sexually transmitted disease), must recognise that a message that views the other party as potential threats to my health and life whom I must protect myself against instead of someone whom I can eventually share my whole life project with is both impoverished and dehumanizing.The sexual act represents for many the highest form of physical intimacy with a fellow human being. In many cultures, the sexual act is reserved exclusively to marriage so that the vital bonds of trust would be preserved.Couples enter into marriage knowing that virginity is the norm and that they could trust that the other partner has reserved this form of intimacy exclusively for the other.It is true that abstinence education does not seem to be very effective since its inception in 2002. Yet we must recognise that the culture in Singapore does not seem very conducive in promoting abstinence as a virtue. Children are exposed to prime time television programmes where sexual innuendo if not outright sexual acts between consenting adults are taken as the norm. The internet is an easy source to view sexually explicit material. Magazine racks are filled with pictures of people posing in a sexually suggestive manner and contain themes which discuss sex like any other contact sport. Teenage girls who are pregnant need not inform their parents if they want to go for an abortion. Contraceptives are freely available over the counter.Faced with all these pressures, parents have to be extra vigilant. Yet more often then not, parents are too busy at work or are themselves confused by the bewildering variety of messages emerging from the media. A couple of lessons in school will be of limited value to young people immersed in a culture that does not reinforce but practically dismisses whatever they have learnt in school.Abstinence is not only the most reliable hygienic solution to the problem of sexually transmitted diseases. Abstinence education builds a culture of trust so vital for human flourishing. To succeed however requires a fully committed effort by all major shapers of culture, the government, grassroots organisations, religious groups, NGOs and the news media. In Uganda, when abstinence was vigorously promoted by these major shapers of culture, HIV infection rates fell from a high of 35% to 6%. Likewise, in Singapore, when these shapers of culture decide to embark on a family planning campaign, our fertility rate fell from 4.66 to 1.24 births per female. If there is any lesson to be learnt by our family planning past, it demonstrates that Singaporeans are receptive to a message when it is consistently and incessantly promoted.Let’s begin to build a culture of trust. A culture of suspicion would spell the breakdown of society as we know it today.