Sex Photos: Teenage Sexual Liberation
These young people have developed the adolescent urge
and ability to engage in sexual intercourse; if we don't
provide systems of support and education for them
to manage their feelings, they will make
their own - as the "pregnancy pact" has shown
Teenage Sex: Adults Get Their Knickers in a Twist [Source]
Over the past week, the media spotlight has focused unrelentingly on the darker corners of the teenage bedroom. First came news of a 10% rise in abortions among under-16s.
Then there was the "pregnancy pact" apparently made by up to 18 high school pupils in Massachusetts in the US, who are believed to have planned to conceive at the same time.
And, at the weekend, headlines screamed about condoms and morning-after pills being handed out to children as young as 11 by school nurses.
But reacting with equal outrage to all of these stories just doesn't make sense. Underage pregnancies and teenage abortions do raise serious concerns, but schools intervening to promote access to contraception should not.
The general formula, sex + young people = bad shows us up as a society that is just as afraid to talk about irresponsible sexual behaviour as it is to deal with its consequences.
This immature attitude only worsens these problems as our teenagers are left under-educated and ill-informed about the risks they are taking.
At the heart of the sex and relationships education (SRE) debate is a question of causality: opponents believe that SRE encourages underage sex and results in more pregnancies and abortions. But proponents believe the opposite, and the research backs them up.
The fact that we have one of the highest rates of teenage pregnancy in Europe is not unrelated to the fact that more than half of UK children aged 12 to 15 have not been taught how to use a condom, or that 51% do not know where their local sexual health clinic is.
Nor is it a coincidence that the Netherlands - the country with the lowest rate of teenage pregnancy in the EU - teaches compulsory SRE in schools from the age of five.
Talking about irresponsible sexual behaviour doesn't encourage it, but failing to provide decent sex education leaves children vulnerable to other more malign influences that might.
These young people have developed the adolescent urge and ability to engage in sexual intercourse; if we don't provide systems of support and education for them to manage their feelings, they will make their own - as the case in Massachusetts has shown.
We need to acknowledge that preventing young people from engaging with trained adults on these issues does not stop them from being affected by porn magazines, hip-hop videos and whatever Google throws up when they type in "sex" online.
These other influences cannot be eradicated, but with proper sex education they can at least be challenged.
At present, SRE is not a compulsory part of the national curriculum. Our children learn about the biological stuff - they know which part goes where - but they don't know if, when or why they should have sex.
I asked a random sample of young people I know what they remembered from their own SRE lessons. One told me that sex was described as a "special hug".
Another watched a cartoon of two stick figures squirming together on a sofa "like spaghetti". A third said he was shown a three-minute animation of "Johnny Condom".
Although the young man said that the theme tune was catchy, the content was minimal ("Johnny looked more like a dinosaur than a contraceptive - I didn't really want to put him anywhere near my sexual organs").
In a rather more systematic survey taken last year, the UK Youth Parliament interviewed 22,000 young people about their attitudes towards sex education.
Forty per cent of respondents described their SRE as "poor" or "very poor", and 73% believed that sex education should be given to all children under the age of 13.
These young people weren't asking for free porn videos and school trips to local sex shops; they were simply asking for the basic, honest information they need to make decisions about their own welfare. If we don't give that to them, we can't blame them for the fallout.
When it comes to science, maths or English, we think that greater information in the classroom will lead to more knowledge and greater maturity in handling the subject - why should SRE be any different?
If we want to be consistent with what we believe schools are for, then we must provide compulsory, informative sex education to every child in the UK. Left alone, we can rest assured that our children will simply fill in the gaps unguided, with potentially disastrous results.
