In overestimating young people’s sexual activity, society endorses it

“AS THE night progressed the party mood was dampened as fights broke out among several rowdy, drunken louts. Punches and kicks were thrown. Abusive language was hurled back and forth in attempts to provoke confrontation.

“One girl lay strewn across two stools, obviously distraught by her actions. She stared at her friend with bloodshot, weepy eyes and in slurred tones muttered the chilling, heartbreaking words of someone so young: ‘Do you wish you were still a virgin? Because I do.’”

Is this the new Ireland? Gemma Harding’s report in the Sunday World recently revealed the decadent milieu in which some of the nation’s teenagers socialise. Minors performing sex acts on each other, often in public places, and teenagers taking each other by surprise by doing lewd things to one another suddenly and without warning: it is very difficult to be specific without being disgusting.

Some of the things going down in the Old Wesley nightclub would be unthinkable to most adults. But here’s an indictment of Irish society: you have to be careful about expressing your concern. You don’t want people to think you are a prude. That would be worse than allowing your child to become a teenager who performs sex acts in public.

Perhaps that is why Health Minister Mary Harney, chose her words so carefully last week when commenting on the news that girls as young as 11 are sexually active. “I think it’s quite an extraordinary age,” said Ms Harney. “Astonishing” was another word that she used. But the extraordinary and astonishing thing about Ms Harney’s words is that they are so non-committal. Fearing, maybe, that she might be labelled a prude, she said we had to “deal with the reality”.

This meant promoting the availability of contraception “more widely through schools and youth clubs and areas where young people associate ... and we have to make sure that if the morning-after pill is required, then it is available to somebody in that age group ...”

While underage sexual activity is undoubtedly part of the youth scene, there are questions over the role of newspapers and politicians in responding. The media may be contributing to the normalisation of people’s deviant behaviour by giving it disproportionate coverage.

According to Patrick Kenny, who lectures in marketing at the Dublin Institute of Technology, the public tends to overestimate. He uses the term “descriptive norm” to explain what people believe is normal behaviour. He does not deny the increasing prevalence of the behaviour exposed by the Sunday World, or that there needs to be discussion. “But people may generalise from the handful,” he warns. “No matter how common such behaviour actually is, the public will tend to overestimate it and a certain type of media coverage facilitates this.”

The real problem is what happens next. Mr Kenny describes as “injunctive norms” the messages conveyed about what is socially acceptable.

“When the ‘descriptive norm’ converges with the ‘injunctive norm’ it has a powerful effect on people’s behaviour,” he says. He cites Mary Harney’s message that contraception and the morning-after pill should be available to 11 year olds as an example. “The message that the reality of teenage sex is to be dealt with in this way gives society’s endorsement to the sexual activity.”

That’s how bad situations are made worse. You have a certain level of deviant sexual activity among children as young as 11. Media coverage leads to social overestimation of the problem. And politicians like Mary Harney put the tin hat on it by adopting a solution that encourages the problematic behaviour complained of.

And why did Ms Harney do such a daft thing? The glib answer is that, like the children in the nightclub, she doesn’t know any better. She is a politician perhaps more alert to the needs of the economy than to the needs of people. Remember her suggestion a few years ago that single mothers should be encouraged to live with their families? It was seen as hard-hearted, not because there wasn’t a grain of sense in it, but because it so clearly prioritised the economy ahead of the person.

Now, as Health Minister, she is showing little awareness of the developmental needs of children by advocating contraception instead of developing strategies to encourage young people to delay sexual activity.

But Ms Harney is not the only one to blame. All but the most brilliant of public representatives depend on civil servants and Government-appointed experts to advise them. Sometimes, where a minister has ideas that are counter-productive, the expert will confront him or her with the consequences of their proposals. That didn’t happen here.

The reason, perhaps, is that the people charged with dealing with the problem have ideas about teenage sex which are about as far out as the minister’s. Ms Harney made her comments as she was launching the annual report of the Crisis Pregnancy Agency. She was addressed by a health worker who said she regularly encountered girls as young as 11 seeking the morning-after pill. The health worker felt the morning-after pill should be both free and available in pharmacies over the counter.

Leaving aside the moral problems which some people have about giving contraception, and more especially the morning-after pill, to teenagers, will the pills actually work? Are they not the jaded solution promoted by a ’60s generation that holds fast to the dogma that the sexual activity itself can never be part of the problem? Internationally, that perspective is beginning to change. Even the Russian newspaper Pravda, which for so long specialised in lying to people, is now reporting on problems with the ‘safe-sex’ message.

“People thought after the ‘safe sex’ arguments, they could protect themselves against any disease,” said Moscow’s Parliamentary Committee for Healthcare spokesperson Ludmila Stebenkova. “Because of the false security stemming from the belief that condoms will act as a catch-all ... there is an increased STD incidence and out-of-wedlock pregnancies.”

Don’t expect Mary Harney or the Crisis Pregnancy Agency to pick up on this any time soon. I am not aware of any studies by the agency to investigate whether the supply of contraceptives and morning-after pills is doing anything to prevent unwanted pregnancies, much less the impact it might be having in spreading those sexually transmitted diseases which condoms and pills do nothing to prevent.

Indeed, the CPA is rather unreliable where statistics are concerned. To back up its contraception-based strategies, the CPA quotes failure rates of 2% for condoms and under 1% for the pill. But the liberal Guttmacher Institute, from which the CPA culled its figures, gives typical failure rates of 15% for the condom and 8% for the pill. It does not seem to trouble the CPA that people might be lulled into a false sense of security by the selective quotation. Rather unprofessional, that.

Yet these are the “experts” to whom Irish society has entrusted the sexual health of its children. They are people who seem incapable of believing that parents, with support, could train their children to behave responsibly, or that the children themselves could be educated to delay sexual activity. Yet this is exactly what is happening in other countries, where campaigns aimed at delaying teenage sexual activity have met with success.

Sadly, history will show that our lot, Mary Harney included, contributed to ill-health and sexual disease among young people - not because they didn’t care, but because they were unable to overcome their own prejudices.