American teens are delaying sex more
This seems like good news:
Fewer U.S. teens are sexually active these days, as many wait until later in high school to try sex for the first time, a new report reveals.
But the numbers are still shocking, at least to me:
The proportion of high school students who’ve ever had sex decreased to 41 percent in 2015, continuing a downward trend from 47 percent in 2005 and 53 percent in 1995, according to data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention…
Sexually active 9th graders decreased from 34 percent to 24 percent between 2005 and 2015, while 10th graders having sex declined from 43 percent to 36 percent during the same time period.
By comparison, significant declines in sexual activity were not found among 11th and 12th graders, the researchers added.
So it’s just the younger high school kids who are having less sex, not the older ones. And it turns out that significant decline was only seen black and Hispanic teens (who had higher rates to begin with, anyway), not white teens:
About 48 percent of black teens and 42 percent of Hispanic teens said they were sexually active in 2015, down from nearly 68 percent and 51 percent, respectively, in 2005.
On the other hand, sexual activity among white teens did not change significantly, the investigators found.
The article also quotes experts as saying they think the reason for the decline is sex education, but I’m not at all sure. No evidence is presented for that conclusion—although it may exist—and of course these experts have an agenda that favors promoting sex education. In reality they haven’t a clue why, as you can discover if you go to the research itself (as I did):
Although these findings cannot be connected directly to any specific intervention, the results indicate that decreases in prevalence of sexual intercourse occurred among the nation’s high school students. During 2005”“2015, the United States experienced significant shifts in various influences that might have affected these findings, including changes in technology and the use of social media by youth, requirements and funding for education, and innovations in and federal resources for human immunodeficiency virus infection, STI, and teen pregnancy prevention.
It would be instructive to learn what the decrease was about.
I recall to this day, some 40 years plus after reading it, an interview with a HS principle objecting to adding “sex education” to the curriculum, on the grounds that the students already knew far too much about sex.
If the function of studies is to engender additional studies, this one will be a great success.
Now STAR testing in California measures the percentage of students at the ‘proficient’ or ‘advanced’ level in multiple subjects at between 44% and 59%. Given that the schools aren’t exactly doing a bang-up job at their basic mission, why are we allowing mission creep to force them into peripheral teaching assignments which they are ill equipped to succeed in? Would that be insufficient opportunity for political indoctrination? Or perhaps insufficient opportunity for graft?
Sexual education because biology and morality are hard.
n.n Says:
January 7th, 2018 at 4:26 pm
Sexual education because biology and morality are hard.
* * *
Indeed.
By sex, do they mean just genital intercourse? Perhaps the youth are still sexually active, but are focused more on oral as opposed to genital.
Why they’d suggest sex ed is the cause is beyond me. It doesn’t meet the standards for ’cause’.
Julia:
Good question. I’m not at all sure how they defined sex.
Humans are easy to enslave via orgies. Just look at them.