Umhlanga is a ceremony celebrating virginity. In South Africa, it is practiced, among others, by the Zulu ethnic group who live mainly in the province of KwaZulu Natal. After falling into relative disuse in the Zulu community, the practice of virginity testing made a comeback some 10 years ago at around the time of the country's first democratic election and coinciding with the period when the ...

BACKGROUND Individual factors such as the value given to virginity and boy/ girl friend, and stigma attached to condom can strongly affect success in preventing early sexual initiation and in using condom consistently. To the best knowledge of the authors, no literature was available in Ethiopia on these issues until the time of this study. The objective of this study was to assess the value gi...

BACKGROUND Delaying sexual initiation has been promoted as one of the methods of decreasing risks of HIV among young people. In traditional countries, such as Ethiopia, retaining virginity until marriage is the norm. However, no one has examined the impact of this traditional norm on sexual behaviour and risk of HIV in marriage. This study examined the effect of virginity norm on having sex bef...

We model virtue as an asset on the marriage market: since men value virginity in prospective mates, preserving their virtue increases girls’ chances of getting a "good" husband, and therefore allows for upward social mobility. Consistent with some historical and anthropological evidence, we find that the diffusion (and the social value) of virginity, across societies and over time, can be deter...

This is a cross-sectional study conducted with 222 15 to 19 year-old female adolescents who lived in the area of a family health unit in the East part of the city of São Paulo. The aim was to describe their motivation for starting sexual life or remaining virgin, as well as the associated factors to the onset of sexual life. The girls that had already initiated their sexual life were older, did...