Young people seem to crave discussing sexual issues with their parents who are often too embarrassed to tackle the subject, a study has shown.
"When parents do speak about sex they tend to give a biology lesson or drum on about the dos and don'ts rather than engage in conversation about decision-making," Pauline Tufigno said.
This emerged from speaking to students for her research entitled Why Risk? A Study On Sexual Risk Taking Among Maltese Heterosexual Youth.
While parents discuss their personal views and lessons learnt on various other subjects - such as money management and grooming - they hold back on sex. This creates a gap in the children's sexual knowledge and means youngsters have to get their information from other sources, which are usually inexperienced peers and personal experience.
"I think that if parents are ready to talk about sex, young people will open up to them," one student said.
Ms Tufigno, head of Cana Movement's Natural Family Planning Unit and a member of the European Institute for Family Life Education, conducted in-depth interviews with 12 people aged 18 to 24 as part of her degree in youth and community studies.
A recent EU-wide health interview survey showed that more than 75 per cent of Maltese never used a condom. This supported findings released by the Genitourinary Clinic (GU) clinic in December showing that about 70 per cent of the 14,000 who visited the clinic since 2000 admitted to never using condoms.
Given the known risks related to unprotected sex, Ms Tufigno set out to explore why people dared do it anyway.
She learnt that her interviewees felt personal social development (PSD) lessons offered at school were restricted and teachers did not place enough emphasis on sexually-transmitted infections as consequences of sexual risk taking.
"These topics are not clearly tackled. Then, in our case, our PSD teacher was a nun... Can you imagine a nun talking about these things," one young woman said.
Another interviewee added: "Everyone always mentions pregnancy. That's the thing most people are scared of". In fact, Ms Tufigno's research found young people thought of pregnancy as the main consequence of sexual activity and did not really factor in STIs.
This tallied with what Philip Carabot, who runs the GU clinic, has been stressing: all too often people use contraceptive methods, such as the Pill, without realising such methods do not protect them from infection.
So why do people insist on having unprotected sex given the risk of unwanted pregnancies and sexually-transmitted diseases?
"Sexual scripts dictate women should not go around with a condom in their bag and they are to have sex once they fall in love," explained Marilyn Clark, head of the University's Department of Youth and Community Studies.
As for men, the same scripts dictate a culture of masculinity in which sex is better without a condom and protection is the woman's responsibility.
Apart from that, young people often feel infallible and think "it won't happen to them", said Dr Clark, a social psychologist.
Building on Dr Clark's words, counselling psychologist Mary Anne Borg Cunen, who lectures in psychology of sexuality, added that people also used "the spur of the moment excuse". They prefer to think of the sexual act as unplanned to avoid guilt and feel spontaneous and romantic.
She said other reasons for not using contraception included embarrassment of buying contraceptives; preferring not to use the Pill to avoid interfering with the body's natural cycle; or preferring to use the natural family planning method, that is, refraining from sex when the woman may be fertile.
As part of her study's recommendations, Ms Tufigno stressed the need for a national sexual health policy, which has been in the pipeline for about eight years.
She suggested that values, such as delaying sex until a mature age, were to be transmitted as part of a holistic education continuum that should not be limited to PSD sessions.