Posted by admin on May 13th, 2009 in Education, Health

A secondary school in the United Kingdom is taking a whole new approach to sex education. Hanham High School started a sex ed class that provides a live feed of six nude men. The men are lined up next to one another, and a camera is used to zoom in and analyze specific parts of the male anatomy. The students taking the course range from 14 to 16 years old, and they must have a letter of consent from their parents to participate.  So far, the class has proven to be successful. Students say they have learned things that their parents would not feel comfortable talking to them about.

“I learned more from this than from my previous sex education classes,” said student Tom Harvey, 16. “It was really interesting the way they taught us about everything. It was practical and made it more understandable.”The school collaborated with “The Sex Education Show,” a television show  that travels across the country and gives such presentations.  Last year, members of Long Ashton Football Club took off their shorts to tell students about fertility and sexually transmitted diseases.

As parents of teens, we may disagree about the logistics and details of sex education but apparently it has a positive impact on our kids.    A new study shows that sex education of any kind appears to be good for teens — as long as they get it while they’re young.”Sex education seems to be working,” said epidemiologist Trisha Mueller, whose study with two colleagues appears in the January issue of the Journal of Adolescent Health.  Miss Mueller, who works for the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, looked at more than 2,000 teens, aged 15 to 19, in the National Survey of Family Growth.  Teens were analyzed by whether and when they had any formal sex education, as well as their sexual history and use of birth control.   Researchers found that:

• girls who were virgins when they received sex education were more likely to stay virgins than peers who didn’t have sex education.
• the virgins with sex education also were more likely to stay virgins past age 15, or 10th grade.  The same effects were seen among boys.
• having sex education while a virgin also seemed to have a positive influence on birth-control use among girls — they were more likely to use it when they started having sex — although no effect was seen in the boys.
  

Overview of Our Situation

• By their 18th birthday, six in 10 teenage women and more than five in 10 teenage men have had sexual intercourse.
• Between 1995 and 2002, the number of teens aged 15–17 who had ever engaged in sexual intercourse declined 10%.
• Of the 750,000 teen pregnancies that occur each year, 82% are unintended.
• The pregnancy rate among U.S. women aged 15–19 has declined steadily—from 117 pregnancies per 1,000 women in 1990 to 75 per 1,000 women in 2002.
• Despite the decline, the United States continues to have one of the highest teen pregnancy rates in the developed world—almost twice as high as those of England, Wales and Canada, and eight times as high as those of the Netherlands and Japan.
• Approximately 14% of the decline in teen pregnancy between 1995 and 2002 was due to teens’ delaying sex or having sex less often, while 86% was due to an increase in sexually experienced teens’ contraceptive use.
• Every year, roughly nine million new sexually transmitted infections (STIs) occur among teens and young adults in the United States. Compared with rates among teens in Canada and Western Europe, rates of gonorrhea and chlamydia among U.S. teens are extremely high.
• Though teens in the United States have levels of sexual activity similar to levels among their Canadian, English, French and Swedish peers, they are more likely to have shorter and more sporadic sexual relationships and are less likely to use contraceptives.
• By 2002, one-third of teens had not received any formal instruction about contraception
• More than one in five adolescents (21% of females and 24% of males) received abstinence education without receiving instruction about birth control in 2002
• In 2002, only 62% of sexually experienced female teens had received instruction about contraception before they first had sex, compared with 72% in 1995.
• One-quarter of sexually experienced teens had not received instruction about abstinence before first sex.
• 44% of teen boys (in a recent survey) said they’ve seen at least one nude photo of a female classmate online or via cell phone (kinda re-defines pornography doesn’t it?)
  

  New Approach Overseas

  A secondary school in the United Kingdom is taking a whole new approach to sex education. Hanham High School started a sex ed class that provides a live feed of six nude men. The men are lined up next to one another, and a camera is used to zoom in and analyze specific parts of the male anatomy. The students taking the course range from 14 to 16 years old, and they must have a letter of consent from their parents to participate.  So far, the class has proven to be successful. Students say they have learned things that their parents would not feel comfortable talking to them about.

  “I learned more from this than from my previous sex education classes,” said student Tom Harvey, 16. “It was really interesting the way they taught us about everything. It was practical and made it more understandable.”The school collaborated with “The Sex Education Show,” a television show  that travels across the country and gives such presentations.  Last year, members of Long Ashton Football Club took off their shorts to tell students about fertility and sexually transmitted diseases.

  Right now President Barack Obama is debating whether or not to cut funding for abstinence-only education. Studies have shown that abstinence-only programs do not work, U.S politicians are still hesitant to eliminate them.  Meanwhile, England is beginning to provide a more technologically advanced program to enlighten students on the topic of sex.  Will it work do you think?

  Teens and Porn

  When I started writing this post, I had no idea my research would lead me to this.  Maybe I suspected that with the aid of laptops, it would be easier to access pornography, but I didn’t really think it was this significant.  Forty-two percent of Internet users aged 10 to 17 surveyed said they had seen online pornography in a recent 12-month span. Of those, 66 percent said they did not want to view the images and had not sought them out.  These are the kids that accidentally see porn.

  Based on a survey of over 400 pupils, aged 14 to 17, in four schools in the south and west of England.  The average teenager, the survey suggests, claims to watch 90 minutes of porn a week. (These are the kids that didn’t accidentally see porn)  Mobile phones and the internet, despite supposed controls and content filters, make porn-sharing all too easy.    Three in 10 pupils say they learn about sex from porn.  Yet porn actors never use contraception on camera.   Asked whether “pornography might give boys or girls false ideas about sex”, 60% said yes.   A 14-year-old girl said, “Pornography puts a lot of pressure on girls. A boy will see it and think this woman is gonna do this.”

  Personally, I don’t think it’s much different in the U.S.   This is the updated Cyber-sphere version of stealing the Dad’s Playboy and viewing it in the privacy of the bathroom.  Only these images aren’t static and (of course) they are life-like.  Makes you think doesn’t it?