Media
Although early sexual activity may be caused by a variety of factors, research indicates that the media plays a significant role. According to journalism professor and media critic Jane Brown, since adolescents see so much sex in the media it is piquing their interest in sex at ages younger than they have traditionally been. Research has "found a direct relationship between the amount of sexual content children see and their level of sexual activity or their intentions to have sex in the future." However, the direction (and mechanism) of causality remains unclear.
Sexuality in the media
According to another analysis, the American media is the most sexually suggestive in the world. The sexual messages contained in film, television, and music are becoming more explicit in dialog, lyrics, and behavior. In addition, these messages contain unrealistic, inaccurate, and misleading information that young people accept as fact. A 2001 report found that teens rank the media second only to school sex education programs as a leading source of information about sex, but a 2004 report found that "the media far outranked parents or schools as the source of information about birth control." Studies have found that adolescents whose media diet was rich in sexual content were more than twice as likely as others to have had sex by the time they were sixteen. In a Kaiser Family Foundation study, 76 percent of teens said that one reason young people have sex is because TV shows and movies make it seem normal for teens. Adolescents may turn to the media as a "sexual super peer" when seeking information about sexual norms and adult roles given the lack of information about sexuality readily available to them. Teens believe the media, as a super-peer, encourages and pressures them to have sex.
Sex is usually portrayed as 'risk-free' in films, television programs, music and magazines. One media analysis found that sex was usually between unmarried couples and examples of using condoms or other contraception were "extremely rare." Many of these programs or films do not depict any sort of consequence for the actions taken place either. For example, only 10% programs that contain sexual scenes include any warnings to the potential risks or responsibilities of having sex such as Sexually Transmitted Diseases or even pregnancy. In television programing aimed at teens, more than 90% of episodes had at least one sexual reference in it with an average of 7.9 references per hour.
According to researcher Victor Strasburger, "Teenagers who watch a lot of TV and movies are more likely to accept stereotypical sex roles and to believe that the unusual sexual behavior that is presented on talk shows is realistic." Strasburger argues that although the average child sees 15,000 sexual references on television alone, missing from these references are the "healthier aspects of human sexuality, such as answers to questions about what it means to be a man or a woman, when is sexual activity appropriate, what a healthy body self-image is, and how pregnancy and sexually transmitted disease can be prevented." Instead, what teens see is "unrealistic. Sex is depicted most often as a casual pastime, a romp in the hay, with little or no consequences. Most significantly for teenagers, casual sex frequently is shown as being normative behavior: everyone ‘does it." In a study of 13-and 14-year-olds, heavy exposure to sexually oriented television also increased acceptance of non-marital sex. Another study found that teens overestimate how many of their peers are sexually active, a problem contributed to by the media.
Effects of the media
Some researchers have found a direct link between the amount of television with high sexual content that teenagers watch and an increased likelihood of them becoming pregnant or fathering a child out of wedlock. It has been discovered that teens exposed to the most sexual content on TV are twice as likely as teens watching less of this material to become pregnant before they reach age 20.
Children who watch adult content on television are more likely to have sex earlier once they reach adolescence. For every hour of adult-targeted television or movies watched by children when they were 6 to 8 years old, there was a 33% increased risk of becoming sexually active in early adolescence.
"Children have neither the life experience nor the brain development to fully differentiate between a reality they are moving toward and a fiction meant solely to entertain," explained David Bickham, a staff scientist in the Center on Media and Child Health. "Children learn from the media, and when they watch media with sexual references and innuendos, our research suggests they are more likely to engage in sexual activity earlier in life."
Several complementary studies have found that television viewing can influence multiple aspects of reproductive health among youths and that "earlier sexual initiation is associated with negative health outcomes." Previous research has revealed two major ways that this glamorized perception of sex contributes to teen pregnancy: by encouraging teens to become sexually active early in their adolescence and by promoting inconsistent use of contraceptives.
These researchers believe that reducing the amount of sexual content adolescents watch on television could substantially reduce the teen pregnancy rate. "It's a cumulative effect," Brown believes. "It's probably not any one portrayal that makes the difference, but it's a consistent, and now unhealthy, sexual script that adolescents do see as a depiction of appropriate behavior."
Teens who listen to music with sexually explicit and degrading lyrics are more than twice as likely to be having sex. Degrading lyrics were defined as those where sex was described as a physical rather than loving act, and where there was a power differential. "Lyrics describing degrading sex tend to portray sex as expected, direct and uncomplicated. Such descriptions may offer scripts that adolescents feel compelled to play out, whether they are cast in the role of either the female or the male partner."
Brown has also found that adolescents whose media diet was rich in sexual content were more than twice as likely as others to have had sex by the time they were 16. In addition to higher likelihoods that an adolescent exposed to sexual content in the media will engage in sexual behaviors, they are also have higher levels of intending to have sex in the future and more positive expectations of sex.
Another study found that middle-school-aged boys who watch music videos or pro-wrestling one day a week are 10% more likely to have a higher acceptance rate for rape than boys who do not watch any. Boys who watch music videos four days a week and pro wrestling 1.7 days a week (the mean exposure rate for boys) have 70% higher odds of endorsing a greater level of rape acceptance. "Both music videos and pro wrestling shows are popular with youth, combine violent and sexual content, and glorify individuals who behave violently."
One study found that the relationship between exposure to sexual contact in the media and increased sexual activity among adolescents is more pronounced in white youths than black youths. Black teens are more likely to be influenced by their friends' sexual experiences and their parents' expectations than by what they see in the media.
However, contradicting these studies is the fact that since 1991, both teen sex and teen pregnancy have declined dramatically despite the media generally becoming increasingly sexually explicit. This is similar to the trend seen with youth (and overall) violent crime, including sexual violence, since then despite increasingly violent media, and neither apparently contradictory trend has been compellingly explained by researchers.
Pornography
Between the 3rd and 10th grades more than 90% of children will be exposed to pornography. Psychiatrist Jerald says access, affordability and anonymity has made online sexual activity "extraordinarily common" among all ages, including adolescents. Adolescents who intentionally seek out pornography, both online and off, are overwhelmingly male. Older youth are more likely than younger youth to seek porn.
The average age a boy will first view pornography is 11, and experts say it "is the major form of sex ed today for boys" and a "a cultural force that is shaping the sexual attitudes of an entire generation."
Family
Researchers at Boston College have found that teens who frequently did “things like eating dinner together as a family or engaging in fun activities or religious activities together” were less likely to have sex, had fewer sexual partners, and had less unprotected sex. One additional family activity per week reduces the risk of sexual activity by 9%. Family activities were "centrally important supports for children, providing opportunities for emotional warmth, communication, and transmission of values and beliefs.” However, "negative and psychologically controlling" parenting such as "criticizing the ideas of the adolescents, controlling and directing what they think and how they feel," increased the risk that adolescents would have sex.
Researchers at the University of Arizona, University of Texas-Austin and Wake Forest University have found that girls who have positive relationships with their fathers wait longer before they have sex. Other research shows that kids whose dads are involved report less sexual activity than on average, and less risky sexual behaviors when they do.
Girls who grew up in homes without their father are significantly more likely to have premarital sex than girls who are raised by both parents. In addition, teens who lived with stepparents or in a single-parent household had notably higher levels of risky sex behavior than did kids who lived in stable and biological-parent families. At a summit in Detroit on girls and sexual attitudes it was revealed that some "girls in that same age group [13–16] are 'dating' men as old as 30 because the men can give them things – love, money, presents – that their parents cannot."
Friends
Both boys and girls feel pressure from their friends to have sex. The perception adolescents have of their best friends' sexual behavior has a significant association with their own sex behavior. Sexually active peers have a negative effect on adolescent sexual delay, however responsive parent-adolescent sex discussions can buffer these effects.
Adolescents who reported sexual activity had high levels of reputation-based popularity, but not likeability among peers; however, sex with more partners was associated with lower levels of popularity.
Comprehensive
The American Psychological Association, the American Medical Association, the National Association of School Psychologists, the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Public Health Association, the Society for Adolescent Medicine and the American College Health Association, have all stated official support for comprehensive sex education. Comprehensive sex education curricula are intended to reduce sexually transmitted disease and out-of-wedlock or teenage pregnancies.
Proponents of this approach argue that sexual behavior after puberty is a given, and it is therefore crucial to provide information about the risks and how they can be minimized. They hold that abstinence-only sex ed and conservative moralizing will only alienate students and thus weaken the message.
A report issued by the Department of Health and Human Services has found the "most consistent and clear finding is that sex education does not cause adolescents to initiate sex when they would not otherwise have done so."The same report also found that:
Family life or sex education in the public schools, which traditionally has consisted largely of providing factual information at the secondary school level, is the most general or pervasive approach to preventing pregnancy among adolescents.... Adolescents who begin having sexual intercourse need to understand the importance of using an effective contraceptive every time they have sex. This requires convincing sexually active teens who have never used contraception to do so. In addition, sexually active teens who sometimes use contraceptives need to use them more consistently (every time they have sex) and use them correctly.
Abstinence-only
Abstinence-only sex education tells teenagers that they should be sexually abstinent until marriage and does not provide information about contraception. In the Kaiser study, 34% of high-school principals said their school's main message was abstinence-only. Some Christian organizations advocate abstinence-only sex education because it is the only approach they find acceptable and in accordance with their churches' teachings.
Some organizations promote what they consider to be "sexual purity", which encompasses abstaining from not only intercourse before marriage, but also from sexual thoughts, sexual touching, pornography, and actions that are known to lead to sexual arousal. Advocates of abstinence-only sex education object to comprehensive curricula which fail to teach moral behavior; they maintain that curricula should promote conventional (or conservative) morality as healthy and constructive, and that value-free knowledge of the body may lead to immoral, unhealthy and harmful practices.
A comprehensive review of 115 program evaluations published in November 2007 by the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy found that two-thirds of sex education programs focusing on both abstinence and contraception had a positive effect on teen sexual behavior. The same study found no strong evidence that programs that stress abstinence as the only acceptable behavior for unmarried teens delayed the initiation of sex, hastened the return to abstinence, or reduced the number of sexual partners.According to the study author:
"Even though there does not exist strong evidence that any particular abstinence program is effective at delaying sex or reducing sexual behavior, one should not conclude that all abstinence programs are ineffective. After all, programs are diverse, fewer than 10 rigorous studies of these programs have been carried out, and studies of two programs have provided modestly encouraging results. In sum, studies of abstinence programs have not produced sufficient evidence to justify their widespread dissemination."
Extracurricular activities
Girls who participate in athletics, artistic, or academic extracurricular activities are less likely to be sexually active than girls who don't participate in any. Female athletes have "significantly fewer sex partners, engaged in less frequent intercourse... and began having sex at a later age." For boys, those who participate in sports are slightly more likely to be sexually active, and those who are in artistic activities are considerably less likely.
Religion
Religious adolescents lose their virginity 3 years later than the average American. On average, those with strong religious backgrounds become sexually active at age 21. Many studies have found an inverse relationship between religiosity and high-risk adolescent behaviors, including sexual activity.