Teens Not Engaging In More Sex

I was struck by this post over at the Well blog. In spite of media attention, teens are not engaging in more sex:

The news is troubling, but it's also misleading. While some young people are clearly engaging in risky sexual behavior, a vast majority are not. The reality is that in many ways, today's teenagers are more conservative about sex than previous generations.

Today, fewer than half of all high school students have had sex: 47.8 percent as of 2007, according to the National Youth Risk Behavior Survey, down from 54.1 percent in 1991.

A less recent report suggests that teenagers are also waiting longer to have sex than they did in the past. A 2002 report from the Department of Health and Human Services found that 30 percent of 15- to 17-year-old girls had experienced sex, down from 38 percent in 1995. During the same period, the percentage of sexually experienced boys in that age group dropped to 31 percent from 43 percent.

The rates also went down among younger teenagers. In 1995, about 20 percent said they had had sex before age 15, but by 2002 those numbers had dropped to 13 percent of girls and 15 percent of boys.

"There's no doubt that the public perception is that things are getting worse, and that kids are having sex younger and are much wilder than they ever were," said Kathleen A. Bogle, an assistant professor of sociology and criminal justice at La Salle University. "But when you look at the data, that's not the case."

If you contrast the data with the hysteria you see in the news -- "Your kids are having sex now, and they are going to die from AIDS!" -- it makes all these moralistic reformers seem like parochial fuddy-duddies -- ranting about the good ol' days when women were in the home and children were taught to be silent.

The craze for teenage sexuality has been used by some groups to justify all manner of policies: from censoring television to remove sexual content to abstinence education. Since the data suggests that teenage sex is getting better, not worse, do you think we could repeal some of these? We could start with the ones that clearly don't work, like abstinence-only education.

Just saying, when you use a premise to justify a reduction in our freedom and that premise turns out to be wrong...well, we want the freedom back.