So says a Daily Telegraph news item, reporting on a recent article in Journal of Clinical Nursing [1]. This brought to mind a programme from 2004 on Channel 4 (nicate?) called Sex Before 16: How the Law Is Failing, in which the journalist Miranda Sawyer argued that the age of consent in the UK be reduced. I still remember my reaction to this, particularly because I see science and religion bearing equally on the problem.
She presented two case studies, of which the first was a young couple who had "started it" at the ages of 15 and 14 and now were happy parents. They seemed a very nice young family, and my reaction was "Good for them! They're only getting on with what God told Adam and Eve to do."
The second case was of a young man who had been sexually active since the age of 12. His only argument was a sullen "why should they stop me doing what I want to do?" In any properly run primate society, he would have been quickly driven out by the senior males!
So there you have it.
[1] Volume 17 Issue 22, Pages 2963 - 2971
This tends to get statistics magnified and ridiculous claims that someone like Dr. Phil makes on his TV show, like '1 in 4 college women will be sexually assaulted' which seems to mean that any girl who has ever had beer spilled on her shoes by a frat guy who says, 'Hey, I like you' is a victim of sexual assault. It diminishes the impact of real sexual assaults that obviously do occur and 'guilt by accusation' overreactions like in the Duke LaCross case followed by the obligatory 'it didn't happen here but it happened in lots of places we never hear about' rationalizations.
My take? Of course it is acceptable to teenage boys to try and convince teenage girls to have sex. There's a big difference between sexual harassment, sexual assault and a guy trying to get laid. We'll all be better off, and real crimes will be met with less skepticism, when we get back to even ground.
But when people that young are getting pregnant it isn't that we need to throw more condoms around or "more awareness" (what youth is seriously not aware they can get pregnant as a teenager) but to stop promoting it in the media.