Young Italians Score Poorly on STI Knowledge, Study Finds

Only about one in eight young Italians has strong STI knowledge. That is the central finding of a national survey published this week in the peer-reviewed journal Frontiers in Public Health, in which researchers at the University of Padua questioned 2,576 Italians aged 16 to 30 across four regions in December 2023. On fourteen true-or-false questions about STIs, the average weighted score translated to barely more than a third of answers correct, according to the paper.

The STI knowledge gap ran widest among males, the youngest respondents and those with fewer years of schooling, the authors reported. Women, older participants and the more educated scored better — a pattern the team says points to uneven access to sexual-health information rather than a generation-wide indifference.

Condoms lose out to trust and embarrassment

Behavior lagged even further behind STI knowledge. Of the more than sixteen hundred respondents who said they had been sexually active in the previous year, roughly one in three said they always used condoms. Asked why they skipped them, the most common answer was trust in a partner, cited by just over four in ten. A partner's dislike of condoms and embarrassment about using them were close behind, each named by about three in ten.

The more unsettling result is that facts alone did not fix the behavior. Even among the respondents with the highest STI knowledge scores, condom use stayed low — held back, the researchers write, by emotional and relational pressures rather than ignorance. The paper's conclusion is blunt: increasing knowledge is not enough to change what people do. Psychological, cultural and relational barriers have to be tackled directly.

A European pattern, not just an Italian one

Italy is not an outlier. According to European surveillance data cited in the paper, gonorrhea cases jumped 48 percent in 2022 compared with the year before, while syphilis rose 34 percent and chlamydia 16 percent. Italian sentinel surveillance tells a similar story of steady growth: reported STI cases climbed more than a third between 2005 and 2016 compared with the preceding years, and kept rising into 2021. Behind the numbers sits a warning from the World Health Organization, which recently reported that condom use among adolescents is declining.

Where young Italians learn about sexual health may be part of the puzzle. A companion study published this year in Social Science & Medicine mapped how 3,105 Italians aged 16 to 30 get STI and HPV information, and found four distinct profiles — from legacy media to social media to expert and family channels. Young people who leaned on social media or expert and institutional sources showed stronger STI knowledge, and school-based sexual-health sessions were linked with better profiles, the researchers reported. Its authors call for minimum standards for sexuality education alongside youth-friendly counselling, testing and HPV-vaccination pathways.

What would actually move the needle

The Padua team's prescription is practical: multidisciplinary programs in schools, targeted information campaigns, and sexual and emotional education that goes beyond the biology lesson. For readers, the actionable version is simpler. Condoms remain the most accessible protection against STIs — including newer backup options like doxy-PEP — while testing is widely available and often free or confidential, and HPV vaccination — which guards against the virus behind most cervical cancers — is now routinely offered to adolescents in many countries. For more, browse our sexual wellness coverage.

None of this means efforts to raise STI knowledge are pointless — the same data show that better-informed respondents cluster in the groups that seek out expert and school-based information. It means information has to arrive through channels young people actually trust, paired with honest conversation about the awkward parts: negotiating condom use, handling embarrassment, and pushing back when a partner resists.

Some caution is warranted. The findings rest on an anonymous self-reported questionnaire, and the fieldwork dates to December 2023, nearly two years before publication. Italy's experience may not mirror other countries, and surveys capture what people say rather than what they do. Even so, with a sample weighted to national population data, it stands as one of the largest snapshots of STI knowledge among young Italians to date.