University of Cambridge

Description

Over a two-year period, a team of researchers from the University of Cambridge's Centre for Commonwealth Education, along with others in the UK and three countries in Africa, approached the problem by thinking beyond the classroom and asking a fundamental question: how much do children know already? "We worked with children at grade 6 in primary school [median age 12] because this is the final year of compulsory education in the countries we were working in, Kenya, Tanzania and South Africa, and also because of a common perception that primary age is too young -- that educating this age group is a risk rather than a protective factor," said Dr Colleen McLaughlin, who leads the ASKAIDS project. "Perhaps one of the more surprising findings was that their sexual knowledge was already wide-ranging." The researchers used a technique called 'photo-voice', providing children with cameras to make a record of the people, places and things from which they learned about sex, love, AIDS and relationships -- the resulting images are powerful and revealing.