Adolescence is a time to explore your limits, test your boundaries. Wherever a parent defines a boundary, it is the function of adolescence to stretch it. This is a necessary part of the process of learning about who you are, where you fit into the world, and what it is that makes you unique. Taking risks is part of that exploration, but when you get a combination of risk-taking and sexual curiosity, you have a dangerous cocktail. Volatile if you add ignorance to the mixture.
One adolescent health counsellor tells of a fourteen-year-old mother still mystified as to how she could possibly have become pregnant. ‘My mother told me not to sleep with a boy or I would get pregnant. I had never slept with him. We had only had sex in the back of the car.’
Studies around the world have looked at young people’s altitudes to safer sex. A condom manufacturer told me that their market research showed ninety percent of people aged sixteen to twenty-one knew that it was sensible to use condoms, yet in only thirty percent of sexual encounters did they actually use one. This begs the question, ‘Why?’ What factors come into play at the time of sexual activity that stand in the way or common sense? The answer is a complicated equation. The most often cited reason is this feeling of immortality, the ‘Nothing can happen to me!’ mentality. It
lakes a while to develop an understanding of consequences. ‘If I do this … then THIS will happen.’ This is compounded in times of economic uncertainty with high levels of unemployment. If a young person feels their prospects are hopeless, they will have no vision of themselves in the future. That being so, then their actions today don’t matter. They won’t care if they look after themselves or not.
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