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PARAGUAY
Featured: Guaraní/Cayua, Guayaki
Service and Service (1954:p224-6)[1] state that parents “consciously avoid
discussion of any [sexual] topic in front of children. Informants also
agreed, however, that all children “know everything” by the time they are
twelve or thirteen and that some may even have had sex relations at that
time. It is said that children learn about sex by “figuring it out”, by
observation of animals, and from older children”. More restriction is noted in upper classes
than in middle and lower classes, where “sex relations soon after puberty are
not uncommon”. Small children who go naked may be distracted from touching
their genitals, but are not scolded; older boys are punished, because of the
belief that it causes “insanity, pimples, and weakness”. The most common
stories about “sex aberrations” have to do with boys’ experimentations with
farm animals; such acts are considered to be the result of natural curiosity,
rather than abnormal.
The 1990 Paraguay Encuesta
Nacional de Demografia y Salud offered a median age of first intercourse
of 19.3 (versus a median age of marriage of 20.9)[2].
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Additional refs.:
Pantelides, E. A. & Binstock, G. (1993)
Factores de riesgo de embarazo adolescente en el Paraguay [Risk Factors of
Pregnancy among Adolescents in Paraguay], Rev Paraguaya Sociol
30/87:171-86
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Janssen,
D. F., Growing Up Sexually. Volume
I. World Reference Atlas. 0.2 ed.
2004. Berlin: Magnus Hirschfeld Archive for Sexology
Last
revised: Sept 2004
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