Oral sex lessons to cut rates of teenage pregnancy [UK]

Encouraging schoolchildren to experiment with oral sex could prove the most effective way of curbing teenage pregnancy rates, a government study has found. Pupils under 16 who were taught to consider other forms of 'intimacy' such as oral sex were significantly less likely to engage in full intercourse, it was revealed.

Britain's teenage pregnancy rate is the highest in Europe. In 2002 there were 39,286 teen pregnancies recorded. The government has spent more than £60 million to tackle the problem but so far failed to halt the rise.

A sex education course developed by Exeter University trains teachers to talk to teenagers about 'stopping points' before full sex.

Now an unpublished government-backed report reveals that a trial of the course has been a success. Schoolchildren, particularly girls, who received such training developed a 'more mature' response to sex.

The study by the National Foundation for Educational Research found youngsters were 'less likely to be sexually active' than peers who received traditional forms of sex education, dispelling the fears of family campaigners who believe such methods actually arouse the sexual interest of teenagers.

Now the government will recommend the scheme, called A Pause, to schools throughout England and Wales following the success of the trial in 104 schools where sexual intercourse among 16-year-olds fell by up to 20 per cent, according to Dr John Tripp of the Department of Child Health at the University of Exeter, who helped to design the course.

Teachers who sign up to the course are primed to deal with queries from pupils on all kinds of sexual experience. Those behind the course stress the scheme does not suggest teenagers experiment with oral sex. Instead they say A Pause promotes the message that other forms of physical intimacy are safer than full intercourse.

'It teaches people assertiveness skills and that they should be only as intimate as they feel comfortable with,' said Tripp.

A Department for Education and Skills spokesman said the report's verdict would be made available to all schools. 'All teachers respect peer-reviewed material, and this will help influence their decision,' he said.

r-ls? segments of Britain may still marry quite young.

Those "certain segments" would be Islamic immigrants.

This is something that is almost always left out of media reports about the "teen pregnancy crisis" in the U.S. -- there are HUGE differentials between rates of teen pregnancy for whites, blacks, and Hispanics. If you break it down along ethnic lines, you see that the media is usually trying to obscure the facts for the purpose of fear-mongering rather than trying to enlighten the reader. Suffice it to say, if you're an upper-income white suburbanite in Minnesota, your 16-year-old daughter is much less likely to become pregnant than the 16-year-old daughter of a Mexican immigrant day laborer in San Diego. But the media frequently suggests otherwise: "It could happen to anyone!" And then they have an anecdotal tale of the photogenic blonde cheerleader who gets knocked up, accompanied by a bunch of generic statistics about how "tens of thousands of teenagers become pregnant every month."

Something else they always leave out: Most "teen pregnancies" occur among girls 18 or 19 years old. In other words, these are not "kids having kids," many have already graduated high school and they're not legal minors. These are young adults -- people old enough to work, to vote, to sign a loan, to get married without parental consent, to join the Army. Why are pregnancies among 18- and 19-year-olds lumped into these statistics, except to exaggerate the "crisis"?

To the extent that there is a "crisis," it involves girls 15 and younger -- not old enough to drive, not old enough to work full-time, more than 90 percent unmarried, many the victims of sexual abuse, and having at least two or three more years before they graduate high school. So why not focus all this public hysteria on those few thousand 15-and-under girls who get pregnant every year in America? Because about three-quarters of them are non-white, and if you focused pregnancy prevention efforts on those segments of the population where the "teen pregnancy crisis" really exists, you'd be accused of racism. You'd be accused of cultural insensitivity and failing to appreciate diversity.

And the same is true in England, no doubt. If you subtracted the births to Pakistani, Egyptian and Jamaican girls (etc.) from the UK teen pregnancy statistics, you would undoubtedly find that white girls in England have birth rates not much different from white girls in France, Sweden or Minnesota -- which is to say, relatively low rates. And if you eliminated the British welfare state, the rates would no doubt be even lower.

This kind of crisis mongering over teen pregnancy is just what you can expect from the media. They want you to be constantly fearful of fictitious phantoms -- second-hand smoke, global warming, semiautomatic "assault weapons" -- so that you don't have time to worry about the REAL PROBLEMS in your society.

Excellent perspectives (again).

I would daresay that most of the pregant teen Muslims would be married already (if not, they'd be disowned, or dead, or both).

And you're right that it's long past time to treat 18s and 19s consistently as adults for statistical reporting and ALL other purposes (including drinking, IMHO).

Your general ethnic point is also well-taken. Inner-city black out of wedlock rates are 80% or more in many cities. Hispanics are working on catching up but are nowhere near that level. But God forbid that we open a discussion about the out-of-wedlock differentials, because it would ultimately expose the civil-rights movement and the welfare state for the liberal plantation that it is.

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.