Moral panic delayed

The Myth of Rampant Teenage Promiscuity - NYTimes.com

The general gist of the article is that the number of teenagers having sex in American (including oral sex) is not as high as some recent reports have indicated. In fact, some participation rates have dropped over the last 20 years or so. For example:

A 2002 report from the Department of Health and Human Services found that 30 percent of 15- to 17-year-old girls had experienced sex, down from 38 percent in 1995. During the same period, the percentage of sexually experienced boys in that age group dropped to 31 percent from 43 percent.

This part of the report seemed particularly surprising:

The reality is that the rate of teenage childbearing has fallen steeply since the late 1950s. The declines aren’t explained by the increasing availability of abortions: teenage abortion rates have also dropped.

Damn. I hate it if a perfectly good moral panic is shown to be illusory.