Paper short abstract:

Utilising semi-structured interviews with young adults in the Sydney region, this paper demonstrates that explanatory models around sexual health in this demographic has diverged from dominant models to capture holistic notions of health.

Paper long abstract:

This paper draws on qualitative research conducted in the Sydney region around safe-sex attitudes, involving in-depth interviews with twenty-eight 18 to 30 year old adults. To capture participant's explanatory models around safe sex as a notion, and actual safe sex behaviour, participants were asked how they defined 'safe sex'. Despite living in a society where biomedicine is the dominant ethnomedical model, and where safe sex literature reflects biomedicine's focus on physical safety, the majority of participants offered a markedly biosocial definition. Participants espoused messages around physical safety while also making social issues such as consent, trust and transparency of intentions central to their response. Yet, remnants of abstinence education were also present, with associated notions presented as logical by some and attributed to the dogmas of religious schooling by others. This paper argues that the definitions provided by participants do not occupy a liminal space between the physical safety messaging of biomedicine and the spiritual safety messaging of the church. Rather, the young adult community's definition of safe sex emphasises holistic health outcomes, with considerations for physical, mental and emotional health. Thus 'safe sex' is not considered a single prescriptive behaviour, but seen as an umbrella term for a variety of different behaviours that shift with different contextual factors. The implications of divergent notions on safe sex in the public health arena mean that campaigns around safe behaviour may not capture or be perceived to apply to the nuanced views held by the population.