Networks of Youth Travelers, Binge Drinking, and STI Risk On a Mediterranean Island

Background: Youth travel in the European south oftentimes involves alcohol bingeing, drug misuse, and STI behavioral risks.  While several coastal European locales in the Mediterranean reflect this type of tourism, the Cypriot resort town of Ayia Napa has developed into a “club tourism” destination with adverse sociocultural and public health ramifications.  Given accumulated empirical evidence recognizing the importance of social and physical environments in public health, this paper elucidates the physical space in which health risks for tourists and locals unfold, identifies the populations involved in such risks, and delineates their risk exchanges and transactions.

 Methods:  In this formative phase of a multi-stage project on public health, coastal tourism, and development, we utilized diverse ethnographic designs including sociospatial mapping, on-site observation, and interviews to uncover the risk topography and dynamics of youth “club tourism.”  Subjects included foreign tourists, locals, local government officials, and various tourism sector stakeholders.

 Results: Grounded in social ecological and social cognitive theories, study findings: (1) provide a map of the sociocultural organization, structure, and topography of the physical context of “club tourism” in Ayia Napa (e.g., beach/boat/club parties); (2) delineate the ways this risk space increases the vulnerability of foreign youth travelers and locals to alcohol binging, drug abuse, and STI/HIV risk; (3) uncover the multitude of intertwined populations (e.g., tourists, club DJs, bar bouncers, rave party organizers) and their informal multimodal risk networks; and (4) ascertain interactions among structural, spatial, sexual, network, psychosocial, and sociodemographic properties and processes and their roles in STI and other health risks of club tourists and members of their networks.

 Conclusions: Preliminary qualitative findings provide the foundation for the subsequent phase of comprehensive quantitative epidemiological investigations on the multiplicity and complexity of bingeing behaviors and potential STI/HIV infection and transmission risks at coastal locales where club tourism unfolds.