Daily Mail, June 28 2002

The sexual behaviour of our children and teenagers has now reached such unprecedented levels of recklessness and damage that it is becoming a horror story running out of control.

Not only is our teenage pregnancy rate the highest in Europe. Evidence to the Commons Health Select Committee suggests that no fewer than one third of girls under the age of 16 are sexually active.

This explosion in under-age sex has been accompanied by a corresponding increase in promiscuity and a huge rise in sexually transmitted diseases such as chlamydia, gonorrhoea and syphilis, which can permanently impair fertility or trigger other health problems.

Sex under the age of 16 is, of course, illegal. One might think that, faced with this wholesale breakdown of the law protecting children, any government claiming a social conscience would set about remedying such an alarming state of affairs.

After all, the law is on the statute book for good reason: to protect children from sexual exploitation and the risk of pregnancy, disease and psychological harm. Children require protection precisely because they are vulnerable and immature and the adult world has a duty to provide it.

But adults now run a mile from such responsibility. Instead, the whole notion of firm guidance and clear boundaries, the bedrock of the adult relationship with children, is regarded as oppressive.

As the Department of Health so sniffily said, it was not up to them to tell young people to abstain from sex or ‘lecture’ them on the perils of promiscuity. Heaven forbid they would ever do anything that would actually diminish harm.

Instead, their response is to drive a coach and horses through the law by handing out contraceptives to under-age children on an industrial scale.

The government is to invite all secondary schools to provide condoms and the Pill to their pupils, including those who are under 16. So it is up to them, it would appear, to tell children that having sex - and breaking the law - is perfectly okay.

Schools have been given a weaselly reassurance that they will not be forced to do this. Such a policy still represents a wholesale dereliction of the state’s duty to children, as well as cutting the ground from beneath responsible parents’ feet.

The argument goes that since children are having sex anyway, the only proper response is to mitigate the worst effects which are teenage pregnancies.

The proposals are a response to the government’s advisory group on teenage pregnancy, which said last December that too many teenage girls were falling pregnant because they lacked understanding of sex and contraception.

Just what planet are these officials and advisers living on? Sex education is commonplace.

Studies show most pregnant teenagers previously obtained contraceptive advice and even visited the GP more frequently than other young people in order to obtain it. And a child can barely enter a chemist’s shop without tripping over the racks of peppermint-flavoured condoms.

What is lacking is not advice about sex or contraception but any moral context - because, of course, it is oppressive and authoritarian for anyone to tell a child not to do something.

This irresponsible approach goes far beyond sexuality. Arriving from the US after the war, a view took deep hold among our educators that children could not be told what to do but had to make up their own minds. The only thing adults were entitled to do was to provide them with the information to enable them to do so.

But children are immature and vulnerable and need adult guidance. Dishing out contraceptives is the equivalent to letting them decide to walk across a motorway, having ensured they are equipped with a packet of sticking plaster and a bottle of TCP.

The adult world is effectively sending a message to children that here are the means to have sex safely. But it is not safe for children to have sex. On the contrary, it does them great harm and not just through the risks of pregnancy or sexually transmitted diseases.

Human sexuality enhances individual dignity only when it is invested with the spiritual meaning and emotional depth that comes from the special significance of giving oneself in the most private sense to another person. If this dimension is squandered, many women in particular come to regret it.

Sexual activity by a child, who clearly does not yet have the emotional maturity to invest it with any such meaning, becomes utterly degraded and can do this immature individual lasting emotional harm.

The government repeats the old chestnut that teenage pregnancy rates are lower in countries like the Netherlands, where there is far more sex education and contraception.

But crucially, the Netherlands is a far more moral society where unmarried motherhood is not applauded as it is here as a lifestyle choice but regarded as wrong.

Moreover, sex education in Dutch schools is generally not more permissive, especially in the many Calvinist schools which take the kind of strong moral line that would reduce our officials and educators to a state of apoplexy.

The fact staring our government in the face is that more contraception and more sex education has helped cause the rise in juvenile sexual activity. This is hardly rocket science.

Yet the government can’t recognise it because of the mind-set of the age which cannot bring itself to acknowledge that any sexual behaviour is wrong. It busies itself instead with dealing with the consequences, ignoring the fact that this approach makes those consequences more likely.

Even worse, officials, teachers and doctors are turning themselves into accessories to breaking the law. The next stage in this cynical spiral of despair will doubtless be to abolish the age of consent on the grounds that it has fallen into disrepute.

Those who argue that children should be taught not to engage in premature sex and that the law should be enforced are derided as Victorian prudes. But in fact, the government is in the process of turning back the clock to the pre-Victorian age.

For one of the great reforms of the 19th century was to raise the age of consent to 16 to protect children from sexual exploitation. Now, by contrast, we regard child sex as a legitimate lifestyle choice. Is this really progress?

Health officials say that lecturing young people doesn’t work. Very true. But the best American abstinence programmes show how sexual restraint can be shrewdly promoted by teaching children from a very young age the value of respecting their bodies, so they don’t abuse them through cigarettes, alcohol, drugs or premature sex.

Resistance to such an approach is not merely due to our sexual free-for-all culture. It is also influenced by the great commercial interests of the family planning industry, whose roots are deep in the unsavoury history of the eugenics movement.

Curbing the alarming rise in child and teenage sex will only happen instead when the adult world accepts once again that children need guidance and protection which it has a duty to provide.