About 773 persons, ages 18 to 64, were quizzed in November 2013, and UNAIDS released the findings to the public today. The Regional Director for UNAIDS Caribbean told us what they found out:

Ernest Massiah, Regional Director, UNAIDS Caribbean
"The first bit is a poll that was on as a nationally representative poll of 773 Belizeans; men and women across the country. And we are asking them questions about their attitudes to sexual and reproductive health, sex education in schools, testing for HIV, domestic violence and child abuse. and what we found is, and I think is really interesting, we found that Belizeans are perhaps more accepting of sexual diversity than perhaps one gets when one looks in some of the stuff in the newspapers. So, 34% of Belizeans said that they accept someone who is gay or homosexual and 34% said they would tolerate someone who is gay or homosexual. And that statistic is higher than what we've seen in many of the countries in the eastern Caribbean. So Belize is really showing itself to be a more accepting society than we would have first thought when we compared it to other islands in the Caribbean. What we see is that there is much more acceptance, but I say 34%, put that into perspective. That is one out of every 3 people you coming across and saying 'yes I'm okay I can accept people, I don't believe in discrimination'. That's the other thing too we found out, high levels of support for anti-discrimination legislations. Belizeans don't want a society that discriminates. When we looked at the finding on say, testing of HIV, I think it's interesting but 40% of people say that their concerns with confidentiality are one of the reasons why they don't go in to be tested for HIV. And we are seeing that across the entire Caribbean. It's really a question of in small societies; how do we ensure confidentiality? How do we tell people that if you come in and you provide us with detailed information that information is not going to get out. So it's a challenge still for the health system to see how you make people believe and accept that your information is confidential."

"The most interesting element of not just our polling but other polls in surveys that we've seen is that young people are very sexually active and when I say young people I am talking about teenagers from the age of 13 up. We're seeing that large numbers of them are sexually active. We are also seeing that in Belize, 1 out of every 5 births is a teenage mother and let me just put a teenager into perspective here. If your 13 or 14 and you've had a child, it is likely that perhaps by the age of 19 you will have a second child. And so for that young mother with two children at the age of 19 who may not have been able to complete school. Who is perhaps going to have to find a job, which may not be able to pay enough to support her children. It affects the mother and it affects the future of those two young children. And we've seen in our poll, support for the introduction of family life education in school but the really interesting thing is that 82% of Belizeans say that they would support the introduction in secondary schools of condoms and contraceptives for young people. And that is something we didn't expect, but there is wide support for that because people are seeing and understanding what is happening to young people. All societies in the Caribbean have two faces when it comes to sexual behavior. We know what is happening, it's very prevalent that there is high levels of sexual activity from young. But we have policies and attitudes that pretend as if we don't really want to talk about it. What this poll is showing that the population is actually moving in different directions. The population is aware of what is happening and wants introduction of policies that will allow people to be protected."

The poll also reveals that 55% of the sample pool knew someone who experienced domestic abuse and 55% also knew of a case where a child was being sexually abused.

That was only one of the reports which UNAIDS released today. The other is called the Caribbean Men's Health Survey, which is targeted at getting information from Belizean men who have sex with men. The Carimis Caribbean Men's Internet Survey was filled out over the internet by 112 Belizean men. Here's what the experts had the say about the results of that study:

Ernest Massiah, Regional Director, UNAIDS Caribbean
"It shows some interesting things. Number one; it shows that these men, 88% of them have gone to be tested for HIV. So you're finding that this is a responsible sample that the men who are having sex with men in Belize are taking care of their health. What we also see, which is a bit distressing, is that 71% of them say that they've had some point in time been verbally abused and 17% have been physically abused. That is a really telling statistic because it's saying that because of your sexuality, you can be beaten up and I think we need to put physical abuse into that context, people attacking you. And that is not a value any society wants to have for its people but we are also seeing that when people are under that label of men who have sex with men, it's a range of sexual behavior. So 63% of the sample that we have are saying yes, they classify themselves as gay or homosexual, 17% of them classify themselves as bisexual, 1% as Tran's gender, 2% as straight and the remainder not using any label. So what we're seeing for men in Belize is that there's a range of sexual behaviors and identities, it's not world is someone is heterosexual or homosexual. It's a world where you have variety."

The results of these two surveys, which came with corresponding recommendations, have been released to the frontline agencies dealing with these issues.