Teen Sexuality: By the Numbers

Tyra Banks revealed the results of her survey of over 10,000 girls about sex, drugs and violence.  The study may not have been a random-sample scientific one, but it did get some conversations going!  A few months earlier, folks were putting together articles for Interlinc's latest edition of Youth Leaders Only Magazine (YLO 74: The Naked Truth) This edition takes on the hot topic of sex -- I wrote a couple of articles for it.  Here's the second (The first one, "An Article about That Subject," is in another post.)

UPDATE:  This article is also available now as a pdf download from the "Try our magazine and then maybe you'll subscribe to the service" area.  

Teen Sexuality:  By the Numbers

By Kirk Moore

“It’s not that way in our youth group!”

“We’ve taught our students differently than that!”

“Christian kids don’t do the same things as non-Christian kids.”

We can guess all we want and we can base our assumptions of teen culture on what we hear from students who want to give the right answers about sex to the questions we ask in our youth groups. Perhaps we should pay more attention to the data. Here’s what the students in our communities and in our youth groups are up to . . . sexually:

• Slightly less than half of 9-12th grade students have had sexual intercourse. (Center for Disease Control (CDC), National Youth Risk Behavior Survey, 2007.)
  
• 55% of students age 15-19 have had heterosexual oral sex. (Guttmacher Institute -  Journal of Adolescent Health, July 2008.)
  
• 35% of 9-12th grade students are currently sexually active (have had sex in the last 3 months). (CDC, National Youth Risk Behavior Survey, 2007.)
  
• 50% of students who take virginity pledges deny it a year later. (American Journal of Public Health, June 2006.)
  
• Within 3 years of taking an abstinence pledge, 34% of students will break it. (42% of students who have not taken a pledge will have sex.) (RAND corporation Study, Journal of Adolescent Health, September 2008.)
  
• 4.6% of students who take an abstinence pledge will be diagnosed with an STD. (7% of those who do not take an abstinence pledge will be diagnosed with an STD.) (National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, 2005.)
  
• Students who take an abstinence pledge are less likely to use condoms and more likely to experiment with oral and anal sex than those who do not take a pledge. (National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, 2005.)
  
• 62% of sexually active students report using condoms the last time they had sex. (CDC, National Youth Risk Behavior Survey, 2007.)
  
• 4% of young women age 15-19 will give birth this year. (National Center for Health Statistics – 2006.)
• Students who receive comprehensive sex education are at a 50% lower risk of teen pregnancy than students who receive abstinence-only sex education. (Journal of Adolescent Health, April 2008.)
  

What do you think your students’ reaction to these statistics will be? What do you think the parents’ reaction will be? How will it affect the way you do ministry?