Brazil is facing its major youth population of its history. There is an aggravation for the difficult situation met by young Brazilians nowadays, because they live in regions submitted to great social vulnerability. Young people have specific needs and public policies must be addressed to their particularity, within a participation perspective. An innovative strategy of peer education was developed within the Volunteer and Counseling Testing Clinics (VCT) from the Secretaria Municipal da Saúde de São Paulo, intitled Plantão Jovem (PJ). The PJ is integrated by 16 to 24 years old youth that develop welcoming and counseling activities, condom distribution and educative lectures. This article describes the PJ from their young agents perspective, aiming to understand how they comprehend their peer-work. Three focal groups were developed with the peer-workers from four VCT clinics from the peripheric and highly social excluded regions. The peers-workers speeches value the identity shared with their communities' youth in the development of individual and group activities, the emphasis in the practical learning, the focus on the encounter and the other understanding. There were identified some critical points in the development of the proposal: value of techno-scientific information versus the encounter and dialogue centrality within Aids prevention; confusion among personal and professional identities, as a peer-education paradox and the confusion between agents and operational technique within peer-education.
Peer-education; Youth; Adolescence; Prevention; Aids
