Background: Adolescents and young people with disabilities
generally face various forms of discrimination. Inspite of this, they
have to deal with similar reproductive health issues encountered
by their abled peers. This situation is made worse by misconceptions
that they are not sexually active.
Objective: The objective was to compare the sexual practices of
the hearing impaired students with their non-hearing impaired
counterparts.
Method: A cross-sectional survey was conducted. All consenting
deaf students and an equal number of hearing students attending
a half way school in Ibadan participated. Four of the hearing
students did not complete the survey and their responses were
excluded from the final analysis.
Results: A total of 78 deaf students and 74 hearing students with
mean ages of 17.1 (S.D. ± 3.0) and 15.8 (S.D. ± 1.9) years respectively
participated. Twenty-six (33.3%) deaf and 36 (48.6%) hearing
students had ever had sexual intercourse (p = 0.055). Median ages
at sexual debut were 16 and 14 years for the deaf and hearing
students respectively. The number of sexual partners ever had
ranged from 1 to 8 among the deaf and 1 to 6 among the hearing
students. Four (15.4%) deaf and 23 (63.9%) hearing students
reported that they used a condom the last time they had sexual
intercourse.
Conclusion: The study revealed that hearing-impaired students like
their hearing counterparts were sexually active however deaf
students were more likely to engage in unsafe sex. There is therefore
a pressing need for comprehensive sexuality education for deaf
students in the study area.