Unprotected sex comes with variety of excuses

Stacia Briggs Monday, January 16, 2012
4:10 PM

The proportion of young people admitting to having had unprotected sex with a new partner has risen over the past two years, according to a new study.

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Almost 45 per cent of 16 to 19-yearolds have had unprotected sex.

The other 55pc were teenage boys, who desperately wished they’d had any form of sex whatsoever.

Jennifer Woodside, of the International Planned Parenthood Federation, said: “What the results show is that too many young people either lack good knowledge about sexual health, do not feel empowered enough to ask for contraception or have not learned the skills to negotiate contraceptive use with their partners to protect themselves from unwanted pregnancies or sexually transmitted infections.”

That, Jen love, or they’re totally hammered.

I was knowledgeable, empowered and able to talk to prospective partners about contraception when I was a teenager. I was also regularly very, very hammered.

“What young people are telling us is that they are not receiving enough sex education or the wrong type of information about sex and sexuality,” continued Ms Woodside.

Really? Even in my day, sex education was fairly comprehensive: I learned how to apply a condom to a banana, the pros and cons of the contraceptive pill (pro: you’re always ready to roll, con: it doesn’t protect you from STIs or idiots) and the videos they showed us of someone being treated for gonorrhoea were so graphic that half the class had to go to the first aid room to lie down afterwards.

“No one wants to wake up in the morning and regret what they did the night before,” I remember being told.

I often regretted what I was about to do before I’d even done it – not that it stopped me.

In the study, 23pc of young people said they’d had unprotected sex because their new partner didn’t like contraception while 15pc said they’d been drunk and had forgotten.

Quite what the other 62pc’s excuse was is anyone’s guess – perhaps they didn’t realise they were having sex, having been raised in a world where a (large, not fun-size) banana was thought to be an accurate representation of a male appendage.

• This article was original published on October 3, 2011