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More unsupervised teens sex

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http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/nm/20021202/hl_nm/sex_teens_dc_1

More Unsupervised Teen Time Means More Sex, STDs
1 hour, 51 minutes ago Add Health - Reuters to My Yahoo!

By Alison McCook

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - A new study of US teens attending urban public schools reveals that those who spent more time without an adult present are more likely to have sex and pick up sexually transmitted diseases.

Dr. Deborah A. Cohen of the RAND Corporation in Santa Monica, California, and her colleagues found that 80% of teens who spent at least 30 hours unsupervised each week said they were sexually active, a behavior reported by only 68% of teens who spent less than 5 weekly hours unsupervised. RAND is a nonprofit research firm.

"A lot of kids are home alone for long hours," Cohen told Reuters Health. "And they take advantage of that time to engage in risk behavior."

Specifically, Cohen and her colleagues discovered that 91% of teens who reported having sex said they had done so the last time at a home, either theirs or someone else's. Boys who spent more than 5 hours per week after school without an adult present were twice as likely as other boys to have gonorrhea or chlamydia.

Having sex as a teenager "is not risk free," Cohen said. "They're getting diseases for this behavior."

A good way to reduce how often teens have sex and potentially put their health at risk may be to reduce the number of hours they spend unsupervised, Cohen said. Most parents have to work, she said, but schools and local government could--without an exorbitant expense--sponsor activities for teens after school that keep them busy, "where their interests are diverted to something that's more developmentally appropriate for them."

Cohen and her colleagues obtained their results from surveys distributed to 1,065 boys and 969 girls attending six public high schools in an urban area. The teens were asked when and where they had sex, and were tested to see if they had chlamydia or gonorrhea. The vast majority of the students were African American.

The investigators found that most teens who have sex say that the last time they did so was during the week. Only 59% of girls who reported participating in after-school programs said they were sexually active, compared with 71% of those who were not involved in activities after school.

Kids living in single-parent homes appeared to spend no more time alone after school than did their peers who lived in two-parent families, the authors report in the December online issue of Pediatrics.

Although the current results suggest teens need more information on how to protect themselves during sex, Cohen said in an interview that she believes that an adult's presence can also have a major impact on how many times teens have sex--safely or not.

"I think a lot of sexual activity is opportunistic," she said. "And if they have fewer opportunities, there's going to be less risk-taking."

SOURCE: Pediatrics 2002;110:e66.






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