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Teenage Sex and the Media

from: http://sexualityandu.ca/parents/talk-10.aspx

In the absence of effective sex education at home or at school, the media have become leading sex educators in Canada. That statement should send chills down the spine of any parent.

Think about how we teach young people about sex in the new millennium—with suggestiveness, innuendo, increasing explicitness and pornography, and off-colour jokes. Parents acknowledge—and often are afraid of—the influence that their teenage children’s peers may be exerting. They should fear the influence of the media much more.

Parents seem to worry most about pornography on the Internet, but the number of sexual messages their children have been given on television and in movies by the time they reach adolescence is astounding: an estimated 14,000 references per year on television alone. And the media have become increasingly explicit in the past decade. On American television, for example, more than 75% of shows now have sexual content, yet less than 15% provide responsible sexual information about abstinence, birth control, or the risks of pregnancy or sexually transmitted infections. Parents don’t want to fight with their children about media. It’s far easier to park them in front of the television set or drop them off at the mall to see a movie. In short, many parents are clueless.

Canadian parents also have a hard time teaching about sex. A recent survey of nearly 2400 grade 10 and 12 students in Saskatchewan found that only one third of the teenagers felt that they could talk to their parents about sex. Nearly half of these high school students were already sexually active.

Although rates of sexual intercourse have declined slightly among Canadian teenagers, 40% of boys and 46% of girls in grade 11 reported having had sex, and 15% of boys and 9% of girls report having had six or more partners. And as they get older, Canadian teenagers use condoms less frequently. Although the US has the highest teenage pregnancy and birth rates in the Western world (41.1 births per 1000 teenagers 15 to 19 years old in 2004), Canada’s rate of 14.5 ranks well above the rates for all Western European countries except for the UK (26.8).

How do the media fit into this equation? The average Canadian child watches nearly 22 hours of television per week, the same as the average American child, and research shows that television viewing is merely the tip of the iceberg. Young people spend an additional three hours per day with videos, videogames, computers, music, and other media. North American children and teenagers spend more time with media than they spend in any other activity except sleeping—more time than they spend in the classroom.

Hollywood executives admit that the media have an extraordinary power to teach, but what are they teaching and who is learning from them? Until four years ago, the only research available about sex and the media attested to the power of the media to influence young people’s attitudes and beliefs about sex, but not their behaviour. Yet even this influence is highly significant. There are dozens of studies that show that the media function essentially as a “super peer” group, making teenagers believe that everyone out there is having sex but them, that sex is without risks or consequences, and that birth control is completely unnecessary.

Recently, three studies have found a cause-and-effect relationship between viewing sexual content in the media and earlier age at first sexual intercourse. On average, viewing a lot of sexual content at a young age lowers the age at first intercourse by one year. Eight studies have found that making condoms available in school-based clinics is not related to the age young people first have sexual intercourse. The message should be clear by now: the media can be a powerful teacher about sex and sexuality, but availability of contraception does not influence teenagers’ sexual activity. The decision about when to have sex is complex, deeply influenced by family, religion, peers, and the media. The decision to use contraception is simple: If it is available, teenagers will use it. If it is unavailable, they will have unprotected sex.

What can be done to fix this situation?

Schools and parents need to recognize the need for sex education, both at home and in school. And such education cannot be abstinence-only. Young people need to be taught about birth control, as well as about other potentially controversial topics like masturbation, homosexuality, and abortion. These days, they hear about those topics in the media all the time. Why shouldn’t they be given the facts, and a chance to discuss them with their parents, teachers, and peers?

The media could help teach sex education in a responsible way, showing abstinence at younger ages, the importance of sex within a committed relationship at older ages, and the need for contraception and protection from sexually transmitted infections at every age. Media education would be useful as well, and Canada is far ahead of the US in providing such education to children. Nowadays, literacy means more than the ability to read and write—it means the ability to use a variety of different media and to decode a variety of different media messages. Studies show that media education can be protective against the harmful effects of media. The Media Awareness Network is an important resource for Canadians.

The media could be part of the solution rather than part of the problem. They could be an important access point for teenagers for accurate and useful information about health care for sensitive matters. They already are an important access point for teenagers for inaccurate and highly suggestive information about sex. But the entertainment community must accept its public health responsibility, and parents must recognize that they have to harness and exert control over the extraordinary power of the media to teach their children and adolescents about sex and sexuality. Otherwise, it’s “Anything Goes!”