"Epidemiology is like a bikini. What is revealed is interesting. What is concealed is crucial."
Huge apologies to whoever said this, as I don't have a source. But just bear it in mind as you consider how you feel when you read hysterical headlines about teenage pregnancies 'rocketing' in Britain? If you are a young adult, doesn't this make you feel a bit picked upon? As though you're being spied upon? Maybe you feel worried and a little threatened?
If you are a parent, don't you feel as though you are a failure?
What the newspapers aren't saying is that almost everywhere in the world, (according to a study from The Lancet) most people first have sex between the ages of 15 and 19. And as or our teen pregnancies, many other, more sensible newspapers and sites are reporting that in fact, in the UK, there has been a 'slight rise, for the first time in five years.'
Men are more likely to start having sex before girls or young women do, and there is no discernable worldwide trend towards more sex at an earlier age. More people are having what might be called pre-marital sex, particularly in the West, where it is also more likely that people will have more partners, however monogamy is still the dominant type of relationship. And finally, in countries where women are increasingly likely to marry young, they are less likely to first have sex before marriage.
(As an aside, in many countries, marriage actually just used to be defined as the act of two people living together, or having mated. Which confuses things slightly. Under this definition, pre-marital sex is still possible if you are both living in your own respective parents' or carers' houses, but if you're living with the person then it can't be pre-marital sex. A bit like 'insanity', marriage is really a legal state.)
We often hear about sex being treated as a commodity. Seeing first experiences being documented like this is enough to make you wonder who exactly is using sex as a commodity? Young people who are finding out about themselves, their changing bodies and attitudes? Or the newspapers, who, as newspaper sales are hit hard by the digital age, are increasingly desperate to write attention-grabbing headlines with little factual foundation?
It is important to remember that for a young person, one of their rites of passage is to claim ownership of their bodies. A lot of parents start out (naturally) feeling that they 'own' their children. As children grow and develop, the whole basis of how they can turn out in later life is to do with how they negotiate with their parents or carers over their need for more freedom, over their own bodies and over where they go, how long for and with whom. In this context, it is hugely important that children and young people do not just see sex as a physical act - it is a complex, multilayered process, to do with identity, past history, social situation and confidence, that, not unlike electricity, has a history of having been treated as a commodity, but that in fact should perhaps be quantified (or qualified) in other ways.
Many of the papers bang on about 'how sex should not just be an act' and then go on to treat it as just that by counting the numbers of occasions it has taken place and the number of partners that an 'average' young person in the UK might have had.
In fact, sex is one of the most difficult things to quantify. You can talk about the male orgasm and say that if ejaculation has taken place in one (or all) of a number of areas, a sex act might have taken place. But what about the female orgasm? What about young women who can have intense feelings that are almost orgasmic without them having even been touched? What about when sex takes place in the head? What about penetration without ejaculation? What about orgasms that are so mechanical it's as though a person doesn't experience them?
In fact a lot of sex takes place in the head, and is to do with how people feel about themselves (not surprisingly). Not to do with 'part a had x effect on part b'.
Let's stop counting partners and penetration and start thinking about how to make young people feel more confident about taking ownership of their bodies and minds.
If you are a teacher, you will know how important it is to have 'high expectations' of the young people that you are in touch with. It is also important to use statistics wisely. Teenage pregnancies might be on the increase in Britain, but it's not necessarily for the reasons being quoted, or with the assumed associated behaviours of increasingly younger first sexual contacts. In order to help young people it's definitely important to understand what's going on, and not be led by a few columnists (and, to be fair, many concerned people as well) who wield statistics like untrained mercenaries.
www.Mother2Goddess.eu
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