Here is some unsettling information about teens and sex:
- Despite decades of work done by safe sex advocates in the gay community, young gay men are again among the fastest growing group to contract HIV.
- After a 15 year decline, in the past few years the United States has once again seen a rise in teen pregnancy.
So what's behind these disturbing trends? A lot of people would have you believe that this is because teens today are out of control or promiscuous. But a study being published in July in the Journal of Adolescent Health disputes this, reporting that such increases aren't related to increased teen sexual activity.
So what could be the cause? A big one is the fact that condom use is on the decline among teens!
As the study explains, "Among all students, condom use rose from 46.2% in 1991 to a high of 63.0% in 2003 and then declined to 61.5% in 2007, suggesting a reversal in the trend [of increased condom use]."
Though the study doesn't come out and say this, one factor that could account for a decline in condom use is abstinence education. Abstinence education is a program sponsored by the federal government which teaches the only place to have sex is within a heterosexual marriage. Because this is the core belief of the program, information on things like condoms, birth control, or sexual orientation isn't part of the curriculum.
Recently, the Obama administration promised to axe funding for "sex" education programs that haven't been proven to work. Hopefully, once abstinence-education is no longer as common, condom use will again begin to rise and we will be able to being work on reversing the unfortunate trends now being seen in teen sex.