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No Longer Innocent
Britain struggles to understand the reasons for a
troublesome rise in teen pregnancy
By Nick Baty
Childhood seems to be growing shorter in Britain, with children as young as 12 themselves having children of their own. During the last year politicians have wrung their hands and ranted about what is causing this rise in teen pregnancy. Family groups have campaigned about the need to take effective action against the trend. And health educators have responded by dispensing condoms.
As Ann Widdecombe, a Tory Member of Parliament, points out: “We have never had so much sex education, so much availability of free advice, so much ready availability of contraception, and yet we have got record levels of teenage pregnancies.”
In fact Britain can now boast the highest rate of teen pregnancy in Europe— higher even than countries like Denmark and Holland, which had taken a laissez-faire attitude toward sex even back in the days when polite Britons did not discuss the subject. Figures show that in the supposedly permissive Netherlands, teenagers begin having sex, on average a year later than their British counterparts. New figures for 1999 show that in England alone there were around 90,000 babies born to teenage mothers each year—four times as many as in France, and six times as many as in the Netherlands.
In June 1999 the Government announced plans to halve teenage pregnancy within ten years. This was, the Government announced, “a radical set of changes to the systems for preventing teenage pregnancy and supporting teenage parents” in England and Wales. The plans included a crackdown on teenage fathers and a massive advertising campaign to tell teenagers how easy it is to become pregnant, and how difficult it is to be a parent.
Said health minister Tessa Jowell:
We need to dispel the ignorance which surrounds sex. We need to combat the low expectations of those young girls who think life with a child on benefit is the best they can hope for. . . . Just as importantly we need to ensure that boys are made aware that fatherhood is not a one-night stand but a long-term responsibility.
Prime Minister Tony Blair added:
For too long it has been as if girls somehow got pregnant on their own —and the fathers don’t exist, don’t matter, or have no responsibilities. That attitude has got to change. . . . Teenage pregnancy is not right. It is not in anyone’s interests and does not work for mothers, fathers, children, or society.
Saying No
Then in October Jowell came up with a radical idea which no recent government had dared to suggest: Perhaps young people should learn how to say No. In a speech to the Family Policy Studies Centre and the Family Planning Association, she announced new guidelines, to be published in January 2000, which would include advice for young girls on how to fend off unwanted advances.
The news was welcomed by family groups like the Union of Catholic Mothers (UCM), who had been campaigning for a stronger moral leadership for the nation’s young people. “In the right circumstances, ‘No’ is a loving word,” said UCM president Janette Woodford. “It’s a question of respecting the dignity of both the people involved.”
“Our young people are being bombarded with images which tell them that casual sex is the norm,” Woodford complained. “We need to stop this propaganda.” Those comments were borne out by two academic studies published in December, which showed that more and more children are having sex earlier and earlier, and that the media represents sex as just another form of recreation.
The first, a study by Glasgow University, suggested that the media are sending out conflicting messages about sex. A report entitled “Representation of Teenage Sexuality in the Media” praised TV soap operas, oddly enough, for covering sexual issues in an informative manner. But the report charged that men’s magazines approach the subject in a stereotypical “macho” fashion that diminishes the young man’s sense of responsibility.
The designation of “men’s magazines” is rather broad in Britain. Loaded, which is aimed at the 25-35 age group and covers everything from fashion to sex (with the emphasis on the sex) is actually read by men below that age. Magazines which are theoretically aimed at the 16-25 age group are in fact mostly read by boys up to 15. In short Britain’s young men, who once thrilled to adventure stories and tales of dashing heroism, now learn how to have sex, why to have sex, and that everybody else is having sex.
“The message in young men’s magazines is that all young men are heterosexually sexually active,” said Glasgow researcher Susan Batchelor. “The message is that sex is macho and that is what all young men are doing—the implication being that if you’re not having sex there’s something wrong with you.”
Dangerous trends
The second study notes an alarming increase in sexual activity among young teenagers. Almost 38 percent of 15-year-old girls who were surveyed by researchers at Edinburgh University had had sex; the figure in 1990 was just over 26 percent.
Dr. Candace Currie of the university’s Research Unit into Health and Behavioural Change points out that the same trends reach beyond the area of sexual activity. Children are becoming involved in a whole range of adult experiences much earlier than they once did, she said. And she adds that the trends also stretch across national borders:
There are a number of factors that are associated with a rise in sexual activity. Children have a larger disposable income and their lifestyles have changed. They tend to be drinking and doing more “adult” things. Smoking has also doubled in the last decade among 12 to 15 year olds.
Currie disputes the argument that there is a link between sex education in schools and the increase in sexual activity. “If you look at countries like the Netherlands, where there is sex education at a younger age, there is a rise in the age of first sexual encounter,” she observes.
Something has gone wrong in Britain. A century ago the topic of sexuality never reared its head in public. The only real laws on the subject were those concerning the age of consent, implemented in an attempt to stem the tide of child prostitution. Otherwise sex was something which happened between a man and a woman within marriage. And since teenagers could not marry without parental permission (the age of consent was 21), in practice sexual activity was for adults only.
Even the 1960s were not quite as “permissive” as popular myths suggest. Although the advent of the contraceptive pill meant that sex need no longer entail pregnancy, the Pill was initially available only to married women, and then only in London. It was almost the 1970s before contraceptive pills became available to single women all over the country. And even then, most young people could not admit to their friends and families that they had lost their virginity—white weddings were still every family’s dream. To be sure, thousands of babies were born out of wedlock in the 1960s, but those single women who dared keep their babies risked public disapproval. Most pregnant, unmarried mothers would be sent away to friends in the country; once their babies were born and adopted they would return as though nothing had happened.
Missing ingredients
Some statisticians maintain that the rise in sex education is not connected to the increase in teenage pregnancy. But the evidence seems to weigh against that theory.
In the last three decades the number of children born to single mothers has been gradually increasing and, slowly but surely, the age of first sexual experience has been dropping. But in the last five years, the number of births to teenage mothers has rocketed, and the age for first sexual experience has plummeted.
Janette Woodford—who is a qualified district nurse as well as the mother of three grown children—sees several reasons for the trends toward adolescent sexual activity. First, she argues:
The climate of Britain is amoral and it is very permissive. The media—particularly the visual media—show highly contentious material. You can’t even watch Shakespeare these days. We all may have known some of the innuendo of Shakespeare, but we used to take it as it was presented and imagined the rest. And although there is a law that says under a certain age you can’t watch certain things, nobody enforces the law. And nobody at all enforces the law that says that sex under the age of 16 is illegal.
Next, Woodford says that parents have failed:
The 1960s were the beginning of the rot. It was the seed that was planted. The abdication of personal responsibility took over. Now we have two generations of parents who grew up permissive and don’t see that it’s their job to teach the rules. And obviously we have two generations of children who got away with it.
But finally, Woodford argues that the current approach to sex education compounds the problem:
We teach them the mechanics of sex. We tell them how to do it, and their doctors give them pills to enable them to do it. And then we wonder why emotionally they are not able to cope with it.
Is there a common denominator beneath all these problems involved in the moral education of British children? Woodford believes that she sees one. “We’re trying to make them grown-ups too young,” she says. “Adults need to take the responsibility of telling them what being ‘grown-up’ means.”
The missing ingredients in the education of today’s youngsters, Woodford concludes, are moral principles. “The parameters are not even being set, let along enforced,” she says. Rather than shouldering the responsibility for the moral upbringing of their children, parents send them off to schools and day-care centers—”so this child, who needs to be taught standards, is in an enormous mass where the teachers or the caregivers don’t dare to make ‘value judgments.’”
The head of the Union of Catholic Mothers suggests that parents, by abdicating their duties, are contributing to the growth of a less civilized society. We don’t respect ourselves, and therefore we don’t respect anybody else,” she says. So in her view, the phenomenon of teen pregnancy is closely related to the rising tide of vandalism and street crime. In each case, the trend highlights an overall decline in civility.
As Prime Minister Tony Blair put it recently, “You are still a child when you are 14 and, in a civilized society, children should not be having children.”
Nick Baty is a free-lance writer based in Liverpool.
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