AMP!: A new approach to sexual health education for youth

Sexual health education is widely accepted as a necessity for adolescents in the U.S., but how best to accomplish it is another matter. Who will adolescents listen to? What and how will they remember? Will knowledge have an impact on behavior? And after a long era of abstinence-only sex education, especially in the country's “red” states, what behavioral goals are we interested in anyway? These are critical questions addressed by an innovative sex-affirmative program called AMP!, an Arts-based Multiple-intervention Peer-education program in sexual health education. To our knowledge, this is the first adolescent sexual health education program to overlap these three particular strategies, previously proven to be effective on their own, while testing outcomes. Collaboratively developed in Los Angeles in 2008 by the UCLA Art & Global Health Center and the LA public schools, the program focuses on self-empowerment and open dialogue about sexual health. The interventions include a performance of original material created by college students (known as Sex or Sex-Ed Squads), testimonials by HIV-positive people, and an interactive condom negotiation session. This presentation will detail the foundations of this arts-based program in performance theory (Victor Turner, Douglas Crimp, and Augusto Boal, primarily). Feasibility will also be addressed, especially in light of wide variability in social mores concerning sex education. The presentation provides support for the notion that arts-based approaches are capable of communicating public health information in a memorable and effective way, thus contributing to a small but growing body of research on art and health.