UK

Courage and good data will help to solve the teenage pregnancy crisis

Statistical bulge

On the graph of teenage birth rates in Western Europe over the past quarter-century, one country stands out. Britain has recorded the highest rate in the region every year since 1980 and now has nearly twice as many births per thousand teenage girls as France, and three times as many as the Netherlands and Sweden. Conception rates, which take account of abortions, are even higher. Why is this?

ondon provides an important part of the answer. Detailed study of teenage sexual activity in eastern parts of the capital has revealed striking differences between ethnic groups. Black men of Caribbean origin are nearly twice as likely as black men of African origin to have first had sex under 16. The difference between those of Caribbean and African origin is even more notable for women. And the disparity between Asian and other groups is most marked of all: black Caribbean and white women are ten times more likely to have had sex under 16 than women from Indian or Pakistani backgrounds.

There are myriad factors behind high teenage pregnancy rates, and reducing them will always be an effort on many fronts. But the guidance issued today to local authorities and NHS primary care trusts is the first to tackle the ethnic factor with any rigour. Its research is sound. It brings clarity to a problem too often distorted by supposition (much of it unfair) and too easily shelved for fear of controversy. Beverley Hughes, the Minister for Children, is to be congratulated for not blinking in the face of facts.

These invaluable facts will focus debate on future policy. Correlations between ethnicity and sexual behaviour help to explain some of the huge variation in local authorities’ success in driving down teenage pregnancy — but so does the woefully patchy use of proven strategies. The guidance identifies three of these: making a single senior official accountable for progress; ensuring the availability of youth-orientated sexual health advice services; and ensuring that teachers and social workers, as well as specialists, have some training in discussing sexual health with at-risk teenagers. Where such policies are enforced, as in Kensington and in Tower Hamlets, teenage pregnancy has fallen steeply since 1998. Where they are not, as in Barnet but also in Windsor and Maidenhead, it remains stubbornly high.

What works in Tower Hamlets can be made to work in Windsor. But the new race-based findings demand carefully targeted strategies, sensitively applied. Where ad hoc initiatives are already succeeding, they should be strengthened. Where new ones are needed, especially to win over black Caribbean boys among whom unprotected sex is especially common, they deserve resources. Those resources should include contraception, and Ms Hughes is right to have resisted calls for parents to be routinely informed when their children seek it.

But contraception is not the only answer. Those who dispense it to teenagers have a responsibility to point out — especially in our overly sexualised culture — that abstinence works too.

Editorial
21 July 2006

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,542-2279261,00.html

 
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