Dr Katie Buston
This profile is taken from the MRC Annual Review 09/10, Seven Ages, which borrows Shakespeare’s famous theme to show how MRC-funded research benefits everyone, at every stage of life.
Senior investigator scientist at the MRC/CSO Social and Public Health Sciences Unit (SPHSU), Glasgow.
Katie’s research focuses on sexual health in teenagers and young people.
Katie began her research career with a PhD on media images of lone parent families. At that time, the early 1990s, such families were the focus of the government’s ‘back to basics’ policy – and the subject of many a tabloid headline. A seed was planted which led Katie to a career in research on young people’s sexual health and parenting. She’s worked at SPHSU for the last 14 years and recently she has been leading a study on young male offenders in Scottish prisons.
She explains: “I was interested in studying socially excluded young men, but it’s so difficult to recruit them to any kind of study – they don’t usually want to come in off the streets and talk to someone like me. So I came up with the idea of visiting them in prisons where you tend to get a selection of young men from socially deprived communities that you wouldn’t be able to access any other way.”
A group of 67 imprisoned young male offenders aged between 16 and 21 were asked to fill in a questionnaire about their sexual relationships, contraceptive behaviour and fatherhood. Katie followed this up with visits to the prisons to carry out in-depth interviews with 40 of them.
“One of the most interesting things that came up was the number of these young men who had been tested for Sexually Transmitted Infections (STIs). Ten or 15 years ago the general attitude among young men was that being tested for STIs would compromise their masculinity – but that wasn’t what I found. Also, many of them had been tested for STIs since they had been in prison and they seemed quite happy to go and get tested within that context.”
This got Katie thinking about the potential of using Young Offender Institutions as an easy and relatively inexpensive way to target and treat men in this high risk group, which could potentially lead to a reduction in the overall prevalence of STIs in the general population.
“If prisons were to offer screening programmes, perhaps even opt-out ones where everyone gets tested as a matter of course unless they object to it, you would probably get very high rates of take-up,” she says.
The findings also revealed that while many of the young offenders interviewed by Katie had had several sexual partners, often without using contraception, most didn’t intend to become a parent. But one in four young offenders in prisons are fathers – a relatively high figure considering that the men are aged between 16 and 21.
“Long term, we hope to develop parenting interventions for young men in prisons, especially the ones who are already fathers but also those who may become fathers in the near future. If we could work on their parenting skills like basic childcare and knowledge of child development, that could have a massive effect. Not just on their engagement with their children, but on their children’s health outcomes right into the future. Because the MRC is able to provide long-term funding we can plan for studies like this in the way that other organisations can’t,” says Katie.
Teenagers are often perceived negatively, but Katie feels a responsibility to defend teenagers against the bad press they get.
“We’ve all been teenagers, and I think at that time of life you have a lot of dilemmas and struggles to contend with. But I’ve yet to meet a teenager who isn’t just trying to go about their life and resolve those struggles. Even with the young offenders, by and large I found them friendly, helpful and happy to talk to me, and they even tried not to swear during the interview (though they didn’t always manage it!)”
“What’s been highlighted to me is the negative aspects of life that they’ve experienced and tried to get over – and how they’ve ended up where they are. If we can develop an intervention to break this cycle and see this make a difference to them and their children I’ll be happy.”
Published November 2010