'Sex should be taught at younger age' – report

YOUNG people need to be taught about sex and relationship education at an earlier age, according to a Swindon Council report.

The findings come after Swindon Primary Care Trust and Swindon Youth Service held a series of discussion groups with more than 140 of the town's youngsters.

The survey was carried out to help develop the Swindon Teenage Pregnancy Action Plan and will be presented before a joint meeting of the Health Scrutiny and the Children's Overview Committee on Thursday.

Young people between the ages of 11 and 17 were asked about what kind of advice they required in relation to sexual health and relationships and what information they would like to receive from their parents and teachers.

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Being a mum made me grow up quickly

By Sarah Hilley

A YOUNG mum who gave birth at 15 has been drafted in to help the Swindon Primary Care Trust teenage pregnancy unit warn youngsters against underage sex.

Emma Page's toddler is now 18 months old and she is only 17.

She has been working on a campaign at the PCT to help it educate youngsters about safe sex.
She advises teenagers to "use a condom and use it properly."

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Teen pregnancy prevention coalition targets parents

by ERIN CUNNINGHAM

Thursday March 29, 2007

HAGERSTOWN - The Washington County Teen Pregnancy Prevention Coalition said it will use parental influence to help reduce the county's teen birth rate, which is the fourth highest in the state.
Coalition Coordinator Carrol Lourie said the county ranks behind Baltimore City, and Caroline and Dorchester counties on the Eastern Shore, according to birth rates among 15- to 19-year-olds in 2004, the most recent year from which data is available.

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Co-sex education needed - Routledge

Boyd Webb
March 21 2007 at 11:32AM

Men and women must be taught how to use condoms together so that they can help each other "when the situation arises".This was what Deputy Health Minister Nozizwe Madlala-Routledge told the National Council of Provinces on Tuesday.

It was believed they needed to know how the opposite sex's condom worked, she said. This also ensured they were used correctly.

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DAVINA TALKS SEX

INSTEAD of waiting until she felt ready, Davina McCall caved in to pressure and had sex way too early.

Rather than it being a special moment, she threw her virginity away. And she bitterly regrets it.
"I lost my virginity at too young an age," admits Davina, speaking exclusively to the Mirror. "I won't say how young in case my granny is reading this!
"I got cajoled into it - as many young girls do.
"If I'd had the sort of education that is on offer now I probably would have had the strength to say no.

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Kaiser Health Disparities Report: A Weekly Look At Race, Ethnicity And Health

Youth & Health California County Addresses Teen Pregnancy Rate Among Hispanics
[Mar 21, 2007]

Cultural differences and beliefs, as well as language barriers, likely contribute to the high teen pregnancy rate in a Santa Cruz County, Calif., community that is mostly Hispanic, the Santa Cruz Sentinel reports in a two-part series.

The county's city of Watsonville, where many residents have come from rural parts of Mexico, has the highest teen pregnancy rate in the county, according to the Sentinel. In 2005, four of every five births among women ages 15 to 19 in the county were to Watsonville residents, according to a Community Assessment Project report.

The county's overall teen birth rate has dropped by 18% since 1996, but Watsonville's decline has been "barely noticeable," the Sentinel reports.

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Christian Youth Abstinence Programme Launches in Norwich

Christian youth workers in Norwich have launched an initiative with a group of teenagers in try to make a dent in the rising number of teenage pregnancies.

by Gretta Curtis
Posted: Thursday, March 22, 2007, 8:46 (GMT)

Christian youth workers in Norwich have launched an initiative with a group of teenagers to try to make a dent in the rising number of teenage pregnancies.

Romance Academy, which was opened Tuesday, takes a dozen 14 to 16-year-olds and challenges them to go without sex throughout the 15-week course.

The six boys and six girls will instead meet each week to focus on topics such as building and sustaining healthy relationships, contraception, sexually transmitted infections, drugs and alcohol, and self-image.

The course, organised by Pregnancy Crisis Norfolk (PCN), is inspired by the popular BBC2 series No Sex Please We're Teenagers.

It is being run by Christian youth workers Sarah Woodger and David Lanchester.

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Good or Bad

I found an article from Santa Cruz Sentinel, which gives news from local area in Mexico. This one is about a girl Janeth Diaz. She found herself pregnant when she was 16. She felt good, bad and scared, all at the same time.

Janeth moved back in with her mother, herself a teen mom. Graciela Navarro was 18 and still living in Mexico when she had Janeth, and was disappointed to learn her daughter would travel the same troubled road.

Janeth, now 18, has five friends with children, ,like Janeth, they wanted children, even while they themselves were still growing up. To these girls, teen pregnancy is another rite of passage into adulthood, and if not celebrated, at least accepted.

It makes me concern about that teenagers might think that getting pregnant is a stage of becoming an adult. I think this is certainly not a good way to experience an adults life, having a child means that you need to give up your childhood. It is because you need to spend your time to take care of your child. And are you really prepare to be a mother or a father?

However, some parents said that relationship with their child has improve due to the unexpected baby, because they understand the difficulties of being a parents. Well, in this point I think it is really uncertain to say that teenage pregnancy is a bad thing or not. Still, I do not really argree with teens getting pregnant.

What do you think? Do you think that is good or not?

Declining teenage pregnency in local area

Provisional figures for teenage pregnancy rates in 2005 from the Office for National Statistics and Teenage Pregnancy Unit are also high in Lambeth, with 79.7 15 to 17 years old out of every thousand becoming pregnant, more than in any other London borough.

But this is an improvement compared to the previous year, when the teenage pregnancy rate was 85.2.

Who to blame? Media or Parents?

There are always arguement that the cause of underage sex and pregnancy. Some said we should blame the media for giving wrong concept of underage sex, and some said that the parents shorld be the person to blame because they did not educated them properly.

I read a news with the topic said "Sex at 14, blame it on her parents" which said teenagers having sex was mainly because that their parents are divorce and most of the time that their parents are not around. The other one said there might be a link that teenagers are having sex should blame the media which they usually portrayed sex as "risk free".

For me, I have another way of thinking. Teenagers are now getting mature earlier and they are curious about sex, but the fact that is they are shy to ask their parents. I one asked my friend Doyin if she would asked her parents about sex, she told me that is "embarresing", she prefer to ask their friends about it.

One of my friend Rav, she has two daughters. Her 5 years-old child aksed her that "where does baby come from?", this is a question which made her struggle to answer and keep thinking about it the whole day. This is just a normal question which does not really realated to sex, but it seems to her that it is already difficult to answer. So, I think that it might be difficult for parents to answer these kind of question as well.

As for media, it might be true that they sometimes portrayed sex as "risk free", but the point is if your child saw sex scenes on the programmes, maybe parents should be the main person to guide and explain to their children about the situation. So, I don't really think that media should really be blame.

Moreover, I also don't think that parents should be blame as well, because this is only a conflict of communication between parents and teenagers. Both sides of them are struggling to ask or answer the question.

Parents not best placed to advise children

This news was long time ago which was published on The Independent , 11 Nov 2005. It was about the idea of parents are no more the best place to advise their children on contraception and abortion.

It all started with the newly introduce guideline from the government. Sue Axon, who is divorced with five children, was challenging the on the right of under-16s to have an abortion without their parents' consent or knowledge.

Backing for the guidlines, Nathalie Lieven, for the FPA, said that "parents were no longer necessarily the best people to advise a child", and that the traditional "paternalistic approach" that assumed they were ran contrary to social changes in Europe over the last 20 years.

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Child sex 'should not always be reported'

By Sarah Womack, Social Affairs Correspondent
Last Updated: 2:05am GMT 17/03/2007

Children as young as 13 who are sexually active should not automatically be reported to the police, the Children's Commissioner for England said yesterday.

Prof Sir Albert Aynsley-Green said nurses, teachers and youth workers must follow Government guidelines published last April which state that while there is a "presumption" that information is passed on to social workers or police, decisions should be made using individual discretion on a case by case basis.

He spoke after Brook, the sexual health charity, said ministers must intervene to ensure that the current guidance, which was causing confusion and leading to automatic reporting, did not deter children from seeking advice.

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Declaring war on teen pregnancy rates

THE FIGHT to reduce the number of teenagers falling pregnant has been stepped up.Barking and Dagenham Primary Care Trust's teenage pregnancy team hosted its first annual conference at Eastbury Manor House to highlight the challenges it faces.

Young parents were joined by delegates from health, social care, children's centres, youth services, housing, voluntary and community organisations to talk about work going on in schools to alert children to potential dangers of falling pregnant as a youngster.

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Teenagers say 'no' to underage sex

Mar 10 2007
Gareth Rogers, South Wales Echo

Two youth workers have staged an innovative project aimed at cutting teen pregnancy by encouraging youngsters to become celibate for 15 weeks.

Youth worker Nathan Scott-Cook, of Penarth, claims teenagers are brainwashed into having sex by the constant barrage of pressure everywhere from television to among their friends.

To prove there was a way to counter this, the trainee teacher found 12 Vale of Glamorgan teenagers aged 14 to 18 who pledged not to have sex for 15 weeks.

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Do you know.....?

Do you know that the age at which girls can lawfully have sex is 16, but there are extra rules applying to the under-13s.

The law presumes that when a girl is under 13 she is not mature enough to consent to sex. So even if a 12-year-old girl willingly has intercourse, as far as the law is concerned, she has not "consented" to it because legally she is not able to.

The implication of the rule is that anyone who has sex with a girl under 1is committing what is termed "statutory rape". There is no defence to this charge - even if a boy says the girl was willing or that he thought she was older than she was, it would not matter. It is the same as when two 15 years-old who were having sex.

You can see there are consequences for underage sex, think before you do it. Sex is not a funny thing to try. It's the same as underage pregnancy.

Sources: BBC News 1999

Pregnant 14-year-old says it's 'fashionable' as four friends are also expecting

By TOM KELLY and LUKE SALKELD

23rd February 2007

A pregnant 14-year-old has told how having a baby is now regarded as "fashionable" among schoolgirls.
Kizzy Neal has been asked to give advice to four of her classmates who have also fallen pregnant since Christmas.
The teen, from Torbay in Devon, said: "When my friends see my bump they say they wish they could have a baby, then three weeks later they're pregnant and don't know what to do.

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Fashion? Or Stupidity

Official figures showed England and Wales have the highest rates of teenage pregnancies in Europe.

Worryingly, the biggest increase in the latest statistics came among younger girls. The 7,917 pregnancies recorded among girls under 16 reversed several years of falling underage conception rates.

In 2005 the number of pregnancies among under-18s was 39,683 - up from 39,593 in 2004, and higher than the 35,400 recorded a decade ago in 1995.

Even the rate is falling, but the problem still exist. Teenagers thinks that having a baby is 'fashionable' , they do not know the consequent of having a baby. It means that they need to give up their childhood.

Is underage sex and pregnancy really fashionable or it is just stupidity?