Burst condom? It’s the stuff of seaside postcards and
Carry On gags. But government statistics released in October blame exploding sheaths for half of all emergency requests for the morning-after pill. Contraceptive failures on such a dramatic scale constitute a safe-sex disaster. What’s behind it? Anecdotal evidence from sexual-health campaigners pointed the blame at rogue products bought from pub vending machines, dodgy sex shops and corner stores. We decided to find out.
So we scoured Britain for the possible culprits, buying obscure-brand condoms, novelty condoms and flavoured condoms from backstreet shops and sleazy clubs. We also ordered them from local mail-order small ads and got sheaths out of pub vending machines, until we had enough of them to fill a weekend bag.
This week we took our haul of 82 sheaths to be examined by an industry safety expert, Paul Brown, at Rubber Consultants, in his laboratory in rural Hertfordshire. He subjected them to the standard industry test, as required by European legislation, which involves stretching each one over a vaguely phallic-shaped metal device and inflating it to breaking point. It is called the air-burst test and under currrent guidelines, if a condom can hold 18 litres of air before it goes bang, it has passed.
At first, the results perplexed us. All of the condoms held 18 litres and all went on to hold 28 litres before exploding, thus exceeding the current requirements by nearly a half. Three went beyond the 45-litre mark. Our tests were not exhaustive; samples are normally tested in batches of 200 and are subjected to other tests, such as being filled with water. The results will leave Britain’s condom-makers and sellers feeling tickled.
But if the sheaths aren’t to blame for pregnancy scares and sexual-disease transmission, then what is? The answer is, it seems, the human end of the equation. And primarily it is the complete failure to put a condom on at all. Bill Potter is an independent condom consultant who sits on the committee that determines British safety standards. He is adamant that “riding bareback” is the fundamental problem. “In most of the studies we find quite a high instance of non-compliance. But people who rush to ask for the morning-after pill won’t admit that. They pick an easy, unchallengeable excuse,” he says.
“Pregnancy rates for couples who use condoms every time are only 2 to 3 per cent. Failure rates, such as breakage, are less than 1 per cent, and cases where the condom comes off during sex are about 0.5 per cent. But with typical condom-using couples, we find a pregnancy rate of around 14 per cent — simply because they so frequently don’t bother to use a condom.”
In the past 15 years, since the emergence of Aids, safety requirements have become much tougher and condoms are now much more effective, Potter adds. But even that isn’t enough to help people who live in the shadow of the disease. “Studies on couples where one partner is HIV-positive and the other isn’t show how difficult it is to get people to use a condom every time they have sex. Many of these couples don’t, even though it so clearly could be a matter of life or death for them,” he says.
Mary Jackson, a nurse who runs a contraceptive clinic for adolescents in Harlow, in Essex, sees the same problem. “One reason why condoms fail is that people don’t use them. Then they are embarrassed when a professional asks what happened,” she says. But Jackson, the head nurse at the only NHS walk-in centre for 13 to 25-year-olds in the country, cites other reasons for human error. “Alcohol also plays a part; they put them on wrong. Tongue studs cause problems, too. They can rip condoms during oral sex, and dentists tell me that they find bits of ripped plastic trapped in the back of young people’s dental braces.
“Ignorance is a big problem, too. Young people often absorb only half what they are told about contraception at school and, in most towns in Britain, they don’t know where to go for the rest of the advice,” she says. “Only about a fifth of the young people who come into my clinic are male. There are a lot of boys out there not using condoms properly.”
It’s not just that young people don’t listen properly, says Melissa Dear, of the FPA (formerly the Family Planning Association), the advice is often woefully inadequate. She wants to see compulsory education on sex and relationships in schools. “We get people phoning our helpline saying that they wear two condoms at once. Doing that increases the friction and makes the condoms far more likely to break. But that is the level of ignorance we encounter, ” she says.
“There is a statutory requirement for schools to teach about HIV and sexual infections but, surprisingly, that may not include instructions on condom use, particularly if the teacher is not trained in this area and has been lumbered with the job at the end of term. We are campaigning to ensure that every school teaches the same accurate information, both about using condoms and negotiating their use with new partners.”
Knowledge and practice certainly can cut condom catastrophes, according to Sydney University researchers, who found the breakage rate among regular brothel users was less than 0.6 per cent, compared with a failure rate of about 7 per cent with “amateur” wearers. And negotiation skills seem sorely needed, too, says another Australian study, backed by the Society for the Scientific Study of Sexuality. It questioned 98 male students and found how openness, honesty and condoms can make uneasy bedmates. A third of the men who had felt a condom tear hadn’t told their partners. Nearly half admitted it was because they were about to orgasm. A third said that they wanted to avoid responsibility for the break. The rest thought it best not to make their partner worry.
The men who didn’t tell were more likely to have slept around beforehand, and not worn a condom, says the report, in the Journal of the American Medical Association. Even successful condom-wearing can mean little to safe sex, the scientists found. Half the 400 male interviewees subscribed to the “It’s the thought that counts” school of sheath-wearing. They admitted that on at least one occasion they had taken off a condom mid-sex and finished without it.
Despite all this, the much-maligned condom remains our primary defence against disease and pregnancy. The Royal College of General Practitioners called this week for condoms to be available free at GP surgeries. Dr William Ford Young, the college’s sexual health spokesman, says: “We are seeing very high levels of sexually transmitted infections. GPs and their teams, who see more people than any other part of the NHS, are ideally placed to help fight this problem. However, they currently have no obvious way of offering free condoms to patients.”
Free condoms sounds like a sensible idea. But perhaps free advice on the lines of “try wearing one every time” might prove rather more effective.
SAFE SEX OR BUST?
Older condoms, and those which have been exposed to light or heat, are more likely to tear. Most instructions advise squeezing air out of the teat before rolling it on.
