OBJECTIVES: to identify violent situations in the daily life of adolescents and young people of low-income communities; to establish a relation between the use of drugs and STD/AIDS risk behavior; and to verify if violence in the emotional relationships between adolescents and young people make the STD/AIDS prevention more difficult. METHOD: epidemiological study with adolescents and young people of two neighborhoods in the city of Rio de Janeiro, based on the results obtained from a structured questionnaire that dealt with subjects' profile, information about the family, use of drugs, daily violent situations, sexual experience, among others. For the present article, only the variables that dealt with aggressiveness, use of drugs, sexual risk behavior and violence in the emotional relationships were analyzed. The association between the variable "I used a condom the last time I had sex" and the questions that indicated violent or non-violent attitudes in emotional relationships received special attention. RESULTS: a total of 1,041 young people aged 14-22 years old took part in the study, 53.6% of them were female. A statistically significant relation was observed between not using condoms (p<0.05) and the categorical variables revealing aggressiveness in emotional relations. CONCLUSION: the study showed that there is an important association between violence in the emotional relationships and the inconsistent use of condoms in the group studied. Therefore, preventive measures should be taken regarding youth behavior that involves the risk of STD/AIDS infection, associated with campaigns against violence.
violence; adolescence; sexuality; sexual transmitted diseases and AIDS
