Let’s talk about sex

Irish society has changed greatly in recent years. The access that young people now have to information was unheard of when their parents or grandparents were growing up. In their days censorship was still strong in Ireland and even English daily newspapers were banned as promiscuous.

Liberalisation and greater access to information has had a positive effect on Irish society at many levels, but those advances have come at a cost.

The aim of the special investigation continuing in today’s paper is not to preach, but to raise awareness of some of the more important issues, so that teens and their parents may be better able to cope with the challenges.

The investigation was conducted among young people in Ireland. The girls were more anxious to talk than the boys. Many teenagers admit to being sexually active, and they talked of oral sex in a perfunctory tone.

Girls complain that the boys are obsessed with pornography, which is readily available on the internet. Teenagers usually know more about accessing the internet than their parents, and they have ready access to the hardest of hardcore pornography. Some are circulating it via their mobile phones.

This has dreadful implications for teenage sexuality, with an alarming increase in teenage rapes. Three out of four of those rapes are not being reported. That is a frightening statistic with appalling implications.