Another article from The Week magazine:

Teenage sex: don’t blame the State
The chief duties of a school nurse used to be checking for nits and handing out sticking plasters. Not any more, said Virginia Blackburn in the Daily Express. At the annual congress of the Royal College of Nursing last week, school nurses described how they spend their days dealing with children who have been sexually abused, lured into prostitution, fallen pregnant or contracted a sexually transmitted infection. One nurse recalled a 14-year-old boy who had contracted HIV through sex with other teenagers. “HIV can’t happen to me,” he protested. “It only happens to old people.” Another nurse described the phenomenon known as “daisy-chaining“, in which “groups of teenagers go around to each other’s homes and have sex in a similar way to ‘swinging’.”

Teenage sex has become a serious social problem, said the Times. Britain has the highest teenage pregnancy rate in Europe, as well as rocketing levels of STDs. Between 1995 and 2002, cases of gonorrhoea more than doubled in boys aged 13-19, while cases of chlamydia tripled. The government has thrown plenty of money at the problem – since 1998 it has put £138m into the Teenage Pregnancy Strategy, which aims to make the morning-after pill, condoms and sex education more easily available – but the numbers keep rising. The problem is that such projects “tend to obscure the message that the simplest way of avoiding the complications of unprotected sex is not to have it”.

Getting that message across should be the job of parents, not the state, said E. Jane Dickson in The Independent. Too many parents have given up even showing disapproval of teenage sex, for fear of seeming square or unapproachable. “It has become a tenet of liberalism that ‘you can’t stop kids having sex'” – that it is better, in fact, to let them do it under your roof rather than risk driving them away. This is nonsense. Children need – and want – firm guidance. You may not be able to follow them around all day with a bucket of cold water, but you can at least make sure they don’t have orgies in your sitting room. “If we are to restore childhood to our children, someone is going to have to be the grown-up.”