A Vida entre discursos: representações da sexualidade do/a adolescente por profissionais de saude em uma unidade de atenção básica.

AUTOR(ES)
DATA DE PUBLICAÇÃO

2006

RESUMO

In the present day, populational growth and the AIDS epidemic have restored health to a position of power for the prescribing of conducts to diverse groups, among them the adolescents. Adolescents represent a segment of the population that has recently been acknowledged as having rights, and that currently seeks for ways to go about the meanings and the control over their bodies and sexuality, which are the subject of public policies and of a medical technological discourse that brings back a ?biologized? perspective in the field of sexuality. This research aimed at understanding how health-care professionals, in a Unit for Basic Attention, grant meaning to adolescent sexuality in their practices and discourses. It also aimed at discovering if there is a specific place for adolescent sexuality in their practices of attention, as we understand that health-care professionals tend to reinterpret and give meaning to their practices based on their references and positions of power. The methodological strategy, founded on an ethnological research in a unit for basic attention located on the outskirts of Salvador-Bahia, combined the techniques of participative observation and semi-structured interviews with ten health-care professionals with a university degree. The analysis of the content of the material was oriented by theoretical and empirical categories in order to reveal the meanings of the health-care professionals perceptions concerning adolescents and sexuality. The health-care unit that was researched does not carry out actions that are specifically targeted at adolescents, and the professionals make use of practices that are still oriented towards giving standard rules of conduct, reinforcing attitudes that are patronizing in their attendance to adolescents, and blaming the latter for the low attendance to the service they provide. The representations of the health-care professionals show a profile of the adolescents as highly sexualized, emphasizing the attention to the pregnant adolescent or to the female adolescent having a sexual life, so as to prevent risky sexual conduct. The health-care service that was researched does not offer attention to the sexual health of the adolescent that takes into account the adolescents places of insertion. It is necessary to establish other programmatic models for the attention to the sexual health of adolescents that will deal with the conceptions held by health-care professionals - which are based on universalizing conceptual models, with preconceived ideas towards their adolescent users ? besides being oriented by the adolescents belonging to poverty-ridden contexts.

ASSUNTO(S)

saude publica adolescencia adolescence sexuality gender. gênero sexualidade profissionais de saúde health-care professionals

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