Sexual resilience within intimate relations among unmarried adolescent girls seeking abortion in an abortion clinic of Delhi, India

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES: Sexually experienced, unmarried adolescent women, usually commence sex, with marriage in mind. Initially, they resist sex but are unsuccessful due to lack of resilience to end an oppressive relationship, or convince their partners to postpone sex or use protection. To retain partners, they accept unprotected sex and suffer its consequences such as unwanted pregnancies, sexually transmitted diseases, HIV/AIDS and cervical cancer. Considerable numbers of adolescents face this emotional stress and suffer the consequences, while some manage to endure and emerge from the ordeal. This study attempts to determine this resilience and extrapolate it to others who might not be so successful without an intervention. METHODOLOGY: The study compares sexual resilience in 100 unmarried adolescent abortion-seekers, in terms of time taken from meeting the partner, to sexual debut and correlates this with background factors such as age, education, family income, self-esteem, sexual knowledge, attitude toward pre-marital sex (PMS) and partner pressure. RESULTS: Mean debut age was 17.32 years. Partners took more initiative to form emotional (64%) and physical relationship (78%). Adolescent girls’ initiative reduced markedly from emotional (22%) to physical relation (5%). Correlation of sexual resilience with age, family income education and knowledge was not significant. It was significantly correlated with attitude toward PMS, self-esteem and partner pressure. INTERPRETATION AND CONCLUSION: It is desirable to improve self-esteem and attitude of young women to build negotiation skills in intimate relations. Counselors have to reorient the perspectives to improve attitude toward abstinence and increase self-esteem to resist pressure from partners.